Murky, but the puzzle is pleasing and the long-delayed “reveal” is a genuine surprise.
A four-year-old girl abandoned aboard a ship touches off a century-long inquiry into her ancestry, in Morton’s weighty, at times unwieldy, second novel (The House at Riverton, 2008).
In 1913, Hugh, portmaster of Maryborough, Australia, discovers a child alone on a vessel newly arrived from England. The little girl cannot recall her name and has no identification, only a white suitcase containing some clothes and a book of fairy tales by Eliza Makepeace. Hugh and his wife, childless after several miscarriages, name the girl Nell and raise her as their own. At 21, she is engaged to be married and has no idea she is not their biological daughter. When Hugh confesses the truth, Nell’s equilibrium is destroyed, but life and World War II intervene, and she doesn’t explore her true origins until 1975, when she journeys to London. There she learns of Eliza’s sickly cousin Rose, daughter of Lord Linus Mountrachet and his lowborn, tightly wound wife, Lady Adeline. Mountrachet’s beloved sister Georgiana disgraced the family by running off to London to live in squalor with a sailor, who then abruptly disappeared. Eliza was their daughter, reclaimed by Linus after Georgiana’s death and brought back to Blackhurst, the gloomy Mountrachet manor in Cornwall. Interviewing secretive locals at Blackhurst, now under renovation as a hotel, Nell traces her parentage to Rose and her husband, society portraitist Nathaniel Walker—except that their only daughter died at age four. Nell’s quest is interrupted at this point, but after her death in 2005, her granddaughter Cassandra takes it up. Intricate, intersecting narratives, heavy-handed fairy-tale symbolism and a giant red herring suggesting possible incest create a thicket of clues as impenetrable and treacherous as Eliza’s overgrown garden and the twisty maze on the Mountrachet estate.
Murky, but the puzzle is pleasing and the long-delayed “reveal” is a genuine surprise.Pub Date: April 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5054-9
Page Count: 552
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
An inventive, elegantly constructed, ably written peek into the secret lives of women from a historical perspective.
In Fowler’s latest (The Sweetheart Season, 1996, etc.), a shady lady from New Orleans crosses paths with a respectable spinster in Gilded Age San Francisco.
Rumor has it that Mrs. Pleasant passed for white when she arrived during the 1849 Gold Rush. A reputed voodoo queen, she was a beauty then and she’s rich now, even though she still works as a housekeeper for her first California lover, the mysterious Mr. Bell. Her specialty: arranging parties at which wealthy men meet wayward women and keeping track of the inevitable results: illegitimate children, many of whom she simply sells to the Chinese tongs. At least, those are the whispers Lizzie Hayes has heard. Fat, 40ish, and unmarried, Lizzie devotes her days to good works and her nights to romantic fantasies. She helps run the Ladies’ Relief and Protection Society Home for Girls, and it’s here that she meets Mrs. Pleasant, with unhappy waif Jenny Ijub clinging to the old lady’s skirts. Mrs. Pleasant drops subtle hints regarding a wealthy father who may well be persuaded to support this wrong-side-of-the-blanket offspring. The Home’s officials won’t approve, but the organization is perennially short of funds, so Lizzie reluctantly agrees to take in Jenny. She has nothing against the sullen child, and she’s drawn to Mrs. Pleasant, whose herbal concoctions cure her migraines. Lizzie even pays a call on Mr. Bell’s faintly disreputable but luxurious household and his languorous young wife, a visit that fires her romantic imagination in more than ways than one. But her sense of duty wins out: when a strange, shabbily dressed man visits the Home and asks to adopt Jenny, Lizzie acts on instinct and hides the girl. It’s not long before the man reveals the secret of Jenny’s parentage, then demands cash to keep his silence. Lizzie’s ultimate decision will surprise everyone.
An inventive, elegantly constructed, ably written peek into the secret lives of women from a historical perspective.Pub Date: May 7, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-14750-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A must-read for Brontë aficionados and anyone interested in the lives and concerns of Victorian women.
Novelized biography of Charlotte Brontë, with emphasis on her love life, or lack thereof.
The Brontë sisters’ childhood ended abruptly after their mother’s early death. Unable to cope, their father, an impoverished Yorkshire vicar, consigned his four oldest daughters, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte and Emily, to a charity boarding school were they were starved and abused. He rescued them, but only after the two eldest were sent home with consumption, which killed them. Charlotte and Emily enjoy a brief idyll studying French in Brussels, where Charlotte develops a desperate crush on her married professor, from which she will derive Jane Eyre’s infatuation with Mr. Rochester. Back at the parsonage, Charlotte, Emily and youngest sister Anne spend their days sewing, placating Patrick and nursing brother Branwell, who’s straining the family finances with his opium addiction, drinking binges and general dissipation. To raise funds, the sisters begin writing under masculine pseudonyms—Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Soon Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey are published, followed by Jane Eyre, a runaway bestseller. Sudden success affords only brief respite from the ongoing tragedy stalking the Brontës: Branwell, Anne and Emily will all succumb to consumption within a year. Left alone with the ailing but seemingly indestructible Patrick, Charlotte fails to notice that her father’s curate, Arthur, whose staunch exterior belies his tender heart, is gazing at her longingly. At 38, she’s made uncomfortable peace with spinsterhood, a topic she explores in her next novel, Shirley. Now unmasked, Charlotte is feted by London literati and once more disappointed in love, for her publisher George Smith. Will she realize the romantic possibilities within her grasp? Will she escape Patrick’s possessiveness? Although the narrative hews very closely to the known facts, it is to newcomer Gael’s credit that she not only builds suspense around these questions but also draws a tear when we learn Charlotte’s eventual fate.
A must-read for Brontë aficionados and anyone interested in the lives and concerns of Victorian women.Pub Date: April 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-345-52004-3
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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