Guest review by Cindy Jefferies: FORBIDDEN NOTEBOOK by Alba de Céspedes

 

"... such a strong feminist novel. The 1950s are a world apart from the 2020s but that is not to say that feelings were any different then from ours now."

First published in 2001 for children, Cindy Jefferies found success with her Fame School series with Usborne Books, obtaining 22 foreign rights deals. Latterly writing fiction for adults as Cynthia Jefferies, her first title The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan was published in 2018, followed a year later by The Honourable Life of Thomas Chayne, set during the English Civil Wars, followed in 2019. Both titles are now available in paperback.

Set in post war Rome, and published in 1952, Forbidden Notebook has at its centre the daily life of Valeria Cosseti. She is a typical wife and mother. She washes the family clothes and cleans the house regularly. She shops for food and cooks it for her husband and two grown children. She also has a job in an office to help keep the family afloat.

The story begins when Valeria is going to the tobacconist one early Sunday morning to buy some cigarettes to put on the night table for her husband Michelle to find when he wakes. He always sleeps late on a Sunday. While at the shop she sees some notebooks with shiny black covers. On a sudden whim she asks for one but the tobacconist tells her that he is only allowed to sell tobacco on a Sunday and certainly not notebooks. Perhaps it is the act of being denied, but suddenly she is desperate to have a notebook and begs the tobacconist to sell one to her. He agrees, but tells her to hide it under her coat in case the police see it.

Valeria feels furtive. What on earth impelled her to do such a thing? And where can she put it? She wants to keep this impulse buy to herself but doesn’t have even a drawer for her own personal use. Nowhere is hers alone in the small house. Her daughter Mirella likes to go to her wardrobe and borrow clothes, the linen cupboard isn’t safe, the desk has been taken over by her son Riccardo … in the end, feeling more and more agitated by what she has done she throws it in the ragbag in the kitchen.

Ostensibly a novel about the daily chores and activities of the Cosseti family it is very much more. Writing in the notebook becomes a guilty secret for a woman who has never kept secrets from her family. She moves it from place to place, desperate for it not to be found because it quickly becomes an account of her internal thoughts, wishes and fears. She is at the heart of her family and it is apparent that they all love her, but the demands on her are many. She sometimes struggles to be the person they all think she is. No one seems to expect her to have an internal life of her own. If she differs from their expectations of her they smile indulgently and tell her to rest, which is almost impossible for one who has so much to do.

This book is such a strong feminist novel. The 1950s are a world apart from the 2020s but that is not to say that feelings were any different then from ours now. I found Valeria in turns heroic, pathetic, irritating and impressive. She is a woman of her time, in a country that has recently lost a bruising war. She has great self doubt as she starts to write, but finds herself putting down on paper not only her concerns about her daughter and the company she keeps, her son’s career and her husband but also her innermost thoughts about her own life, which she has hardly allowed herself to recognise up until now. Where the notebook leads her, what she does with her life and whether the notebook is discovered, all play out while she sits up late, after everyone has gone to bed, which is virtually the only time she has to put her thoughts down without being interrupted. Valeria lived with me for a long time after I finished the novel. 

Alba de Céspedes achieved something very special when she created Forbidden Notebook. The Financial Times called it ‘an exquisite, tormented howl,’ and it certainly is a tour de force. Is it about a life wasted, or a life found? I still find it hard to decide. Read it and ponder …

Forbidden Notebook is published by Pushkin Press, and was also chosen by Nick Manns in our Books of the Year feature.

ETTA LEMON: The Woman who Saved the Birds by Tessa Boase, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

'The RSPB was started by the determined efforts of four women ... but it was Etta's voice that spoke most clearly from the archives."

Photograph by Saira Archer

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. Her second novel for adults, The One True Thing, was published in 2025 as one of the launch titles for Writers Review Publishing. Her first adult novel, Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon (in paperback as Missing Rose) was a Radio 2 Book Club Choice. In addition to her many fiction titles for young readers she has written This Book is Cruelty Free - Animals and Us, a guide to compassionate living for teenagers and adults. The Hide will be published this autumn. 

As I'm trying not to add to my already overflowing bookshelves, I attended Tessa Boase's event for Rye Arts Festival in September with no intention of buying Etta Lemon. But the talk was so packed, informative and entertaining that I couldn't resist, and bagged a copy before they'd all been snatched from the pile. 

As Tessa Boase points out, birdwatching - especially twitching - is still mainly the preserve of men. But the RSPB was started by the determined efforts of four women: Etta (Margaretta) Lemon, Emily Williamson, Eliza Brightwen and Eliza Phillips, names known to only a small fraction of the million-plus members of what's now one of our largest conservation bodies. Of the four, Boase says, it was always Etta's voice that spoke most clearly from the archives. Yet when she began her research, there was 'not a plaque, not a portrait at headquarters, not a mention in the canon .. It was as if (Etta Lemon) had been completely erased from the conservation narrative.' Part of Boase's achievement has been to right that wrong. Etta now has not only her plaque, and a portrait at RSPB headquarters, but this compelling tribute, too.

The trade in plumage, skins and entire birds in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was horrific, not only because it depended on the mass capture and slaughter of birds in many countries, but also because of harsh conditions for the workers involved in dyeing and tweaking feathers for the millinery industry - a labour force that included children. Millinery was certainly big business; in 1891, Boase records, there were 548 milliners in Greater London alone. Hats were adorned with feathers, wings (classed as 'novelties') and even whole birds; an illustration shows a grotesque hat with what appears to be three budgerigars flattened and fastened around it. 

It's widely known that the great crested grebe was driven to the verge of extinction by fashionable greed for its showy plumage. Whereas once ostrich plumes had been de rigeur, the choice widened alarmingly. Describing a plumage sale in London in 1888, Boase writes: "Here were birds by the shipload." The plumes of snowy egrets were much in demand: an undercover reporter noted that 16,000 packages of these were on sale, along with seven or eight thousand parrots, over 12,000 tiny hummingbirds and "several hundred each of Hawks, Owls, Gulls, Terns, Ducks, Ibises, Finches, Orioles ..." Horrible to contemplate, especially with our hindsight knowledge of the drastic decline in bird populations.

Noting the weekly parade of feathers in church each Sunday, Etta, in her late teens, began her campaign by writing individual letters to 'Feather Bedecked Women', soon joining the Fur, Fin and Feather Folk run by Eliza Phillips, a considerably older woman. The Society for the Protection of Birds was founded in Manchester by another campaigner, Emily Williamson, and began as an all-female group in which members signed a pledge not to wear feathers. These two groups - The Fur, Fin and Feather Folk and the SPB - were brought together by the RSPCA which then, as now, saw itself as a moderate pressure group, distancing itself from 'extremists'. The amalgamation of the two, with Etta as Honorary Secretary, attracted attention, allegiance and - crucially - donations. However, support from highly-placed women led to an exemption for feathers from so-called 'game' birds, the aristocracy not wishing to jeopardise its favoured occupation, field shooting. (Hmm, not much change there, then.) In 1904, with royal approval granted, the SPB became the RSPB.

Boase draws parallels between Etta Lemon and her contemporaries Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Fawcett, examining the various approaches to campaign strategies. The suffragettes, drawn mainly from well-heeled women, were highly fashion-conscious and publicity aware. To Etta's distress, bird plumage featured prominently on their headgear - just look at the photographs of suffragette marches - and certainly on the hats of Emmeline Pankhurst herself. (In fact this book was first published as Mrs Pankhurst's Purple Feather.) There are other ways, too, in which Etta Lemon's campaign was at odds with the suffrage campaign. It seems barely comprehensible to us now that there could have been an anti-suffrage counter-protest, led by women, yet Etta was one of its members. Ironically, as Boase points out, those women who led this faction were bold, articulate and determined - qualities which would have admirably fitted them for politics. 

Although it's taken so long for Etta's conservation work to be acknowledged, she was a public figure in other ways: she became lady mayoress in 1911 when her husband Frank was appointed mayor of Reigate, and during the First World War she took on the management of the Redhill War Hospital, for which she was awarded MBE. 

If it's hard to imagine nowadays that it could have been acceptable to use the feathers of a bird of paradise for adornment, consider one of the modern equivalents: the high status of reptile-skin bags sold by Hermès and other designers, including the iconic 'Birkin' bag. Apparently the singer and actress Jane Birkin wanted her name removed from the item when she learned that crocodiles and alligators were reared for the purpose in bleak conditions and horribly killed, but the name has stuck. If you should want one (though I hope you don't), be prepared to pay upwards of £450,000 - though the real price, of course, is in animal suffering. On the plus side, London Fashion Week declared itself fur-free from 2024, with a ban on wild animal skins too. A ban on the use of wild bird feathers is yet to come. Fashion has a way to go before it can be called cruelty-free, but fortunately there are plenty of latter-day Etta Lemons pushing for change. (Step forward, PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, among other organisations.)

Tessa Boase is as engaging a writer as she is a speaker. Her book, an illuminating sweep of social history, illustrates the much-quoted maxim of the anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Etta Lemon: the Woman who Saved the Birds is published by Aurum

Linda Newbery's The One True Thing is published by Writers Review Publishing.

More bird-related reviews:

This Birding Life by Stephen Moss, reviewed by Nick Hodges

12 Birds to Save your Life - Nature's Lessons in Happiness by Charlie Corbett, reviewed by Linda Sargent

A Sweet Wild Note: what we hear when the birds sing by Richard Smyth, reviewed by Dawn Finch

Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds - Stories of Extinctions by Barbara Allen, reviewed by Linda Newbery

Q & A: Màiri Kidd on her new novel THE SPECIMENS

 

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"Sometimes it can seem that books set in Scotland face extra challenges south of the Border and I do hope it reaches readers outside Scotland too – I don’t think it’s a country-bound story, much of what it has to say about power and agency (or lack thereof) is really universal."

Màiri Kidd is Director at the Saltire Society and was formerly Head of Literature, Languages and Publishing at Creative Scotland and Managing Director of Barrington Stoke, a prize-winning publisher. A fluent Gaelic speaker, she has an MA in Celtic Studies from Edinburgh University. As CEO of Stòrlann, the National Gaelic Education Resource Agency, she worked with Scottish Government, Bòrd na Gàidhlig and local authorities. Mairi is a contributor to BBC Radio nan Gàidheal’s books coverage and writes for broadcast, including Gaelic comedy series FUNC. The Specimens is her first novel for adults.

Up the close and down the stair, meet the women of Burke and Hare ...

Edinburgh, 1828. Two women - one rich, one poor - must navigate life against a frenzied backdrop of medical discovery, mob mayhem, and murder.

The home Helen shares in the slums of the Old Town with her lover William Burke could hardly be more different from Susan's dreams of an affluent existence as the wife of Robert Knox, one of the foremost anatomists of the day. But as people begin disappearing, these two very different women face an impossible choice. Should they protect what lives they have or tell the truth about what they know?

This is the story of the notorious serial killings of Burke and Hare, told for the first time through the eyes of two very different women, whose stories explore the depths of the human heart in a perilous, vulnerable world.

WR: Firstly, congratulations - this is a compelling read which I finished within three days. And the book is very handsomely produced by Black & White Publishing, with its striking cover. I certainly learned more about the exploits of Burke and Hare than I'd known previously, and looked up more details after finishing. You've written widely on folklore and feminism but I believe this is your first novel for adults. What was the impulsion behind it - was this something you'd been thinking about for some while?

Màiri: Thank you!

The motivation for writing about the Burke and Hare case was originally to give (fictional) voice to the voiceless. I have previously sought to do this by writing non-fiction and short fiction about Scotland’s ‘witches’, who have a lot in common with the Burke and Hare victims - mostly women, generally poor and powerless, and their bodies were destroyed after death. In both cases, also, there’s a general perception that the facts are well known and well understood whereas in truth, many people hold serious misconceptions about the witches and about Burke and Hare, and so there’s a lot to explore. I did flirt with the idea of working in short format and with non-fiction but Black and White encouraged me to write it as a novel and I’m glad they did.

WR: I was astonished to read in the Acknowledgments that you drafted the novel in just a few months, alongside your full-time job and a position on the board of MG Alba (the BBC's partner in delivering media services through Gaelic). Had you already done much of the plotting and research before that?

Màiri: First off, I should perhaps say I don’t recommend this as a way of working - there were various reasons behind the short turnaround, but of course it wasn’t ideal. Needs must, though, and I had to find a way to make it work to my benefit. I told myself if would be as though I were living the plot in real time – the killings happened over about a year – and the fact I was often working at night certainly helped with the dark atmosphere I wanted.

I hadn’t plotted the book at all before I began – all I had written was one of the victims’ narratives as a short story. I knew the basics of the story because I grew up here and it is very widely known, and I plotted it very strictly to help make best use of the writing time (I did deviate a bit from my outline in the end, but not much). In terms of research, I was lucky in that I wanted to know the facts but thereafter rather to avoid reading other people’s analyses of the whys and wherefores so I could make up my own mind. That saved some time…

WR: Your novel covers a span of nine years, not including the prologue and epilogue, and is told from the viewpoints of several characters - mainly Helen, the lover of William Burke, and Susan, the wife of anatomist Robert Knox. How did you decide on this structure? Was it difficult to contain so much information within the frame of the novel?

Màiri: I am a big fan of Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five: the Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper and wished that a treatment of that sort might be possible for the Burke and Hare crimes, but it just isn’t. The killings happened around sixty years earlier, before universal registration, the victims were often itinerant, and their remains were destroyed. It’s unlikely that we will ever know more than we do, and it’s not enough for a book. I hit, then, on the idea of writing about the women in Burke and Hare’s lives as a means of telling the story. Helen MacDougall immediately presented as a medium for the ‘action’, and as I began to read more about the case, I discovered that Knox the anatomist – Burke and Hare’s ‘client’ – had a wife no one knew existed because (as one of the few who knew her understood) she wasn’t of an appropriate social standing. From this I began to think in terms of a two-hander with victims’ stories interwoven throughout.

The greatest challenge I found I faced wasn’t the volume of information – the women don’t have all the information at any point in the book – but rather creating a twin plot. That took some tweaking of timelines so that the set pieces of Helen’s and Susan’s stories could work as one novel, and there were times I struggled with that. I had a lot of pieces of paper on my desk with dates and times for different happenings and I scratched my head a great deal.

WR: The selling of dead bodies will come as no surprise to the majority of readers, who will know what's going on behind the scenes at Tanners Close and Dr Knox's surgical theatre for some while before either of the women, Helen or Susan, begins to suspect. Yet there's still plenty of tension as events unfold - was this something you felt you needed to address?

Màiri: I think that was my greatest concern as I worked – how can one sustain tension when the ‘end’ is known to almost every reader? My ‘solution’ was to try to use that foreknowledge to create a sense of dread in Susan and Helen’s stories as the reader knows more than they do. In the stories of the victims, I wanted to focus on their lives, so their ends arrive very quickly and aren’t really the point at all. That was my tribute to The Five.

WR: As we enter into the relationship between Helen MacDougal and William Burke, Helen having been treated with horrible brutality by her late husband, we see that William can be kind, tender, considerate and even conscience-stricken, and sense that his fate could have turned out very differently. Did this come from your research, or was it your wish to differentiate between him and the apparently far more callous William Hare?

Màiri: This is something a lot of readers have asked me about – they struggle with the idea that Burke might have been likeable at times. I think he must have been, because he was able to earn the trust of some of the victims, and indeed one poor woman was handed into his care by a policeman, presumably on the understanding she’d sleep off the alcohol she’d drunk in the lodging house. His relationship with Helen was of long standing and seems to have held some level of genuine affection.

Fundamentally, I understood Burke as weak, uncontrolled, violent, self-pitying but broadly ‘normal’ – he wasn’t a psychopath, he felt remorse as far as we can tell, being dependent on alcohol and opium to sleep during the killings. The motivations of people without empathy don’t interest me, but the actions of people who should know better do.

Perhaps, too, there is some bias in me – when we learned the story as children, of course we learned that Hare turned on Burke in the end, and got off Scot free. That has rankled ever after in the Scottish mind, I think!

WR: The reader is encouraged to sympathise with Helen, who wants to see the best in her lover - but do you think she is too forgiving, to the point of complicity?

Màiri: I think ‘my’ Helen does something many of us will recognise – put kindly, seeing the best in people, or less kindly, turning a blind eye to significant concerns. People are terribly torn in their loyalties when loved ones do awful things – just look at the partners of perpetrators in the Pélicot case in France who have refused to accept the wrongdoing of their partners.

The level to which the real Helen was complicit is unclear and I had to make a call on that for the book. In my early reading around the case, I was struck by the fact that the Hares wanted William Burke to kill Helen, and Burke took Helen out of Edinburgh for a time, presumably to keep her safe. They seem to have left the Hares’ house thereafter. That doesn’t really speak to me of a fully complicit member of the ‘gang’. Again, though, I recognise my own biases! Helen was described by one commentator as a female ‘of the degraded sort’ and that perhaps made me pity her. Society definitely viewed people in that way, had no ambition for them and accordingly offered no safety net, creating the conditions for people without a strong moral compass to be motivated and able to do awful things, or to turn a blind eye.

WR: Susan, Dr Knox's (supposed) wife, is largely your own creation, and in her way she is just as much a 'specimen' as the bodies procured by Burke and Hare - kept in close confinement, repeatedly pregnant and used shockingly as the object of observation and experimentation. You cleverly use the device of the dolls' house and its miniatures both to emphasise her infantilisation by Knox and to link her story with Helen's, and later to reach a kind of resolution. How did this idea come to you?

Màiri: The idea of miniatures came to me in part because the plot links to a set of miniature coffins found on Edinburgh’s city centre volcano Arthur’s Seat in the early 1830s and which are traditionally associated with the killings. Recent research has suggested that the coffins were made with cobblers’ tools and that suggested a plot thread to me.

More broadly, the idea of collecting is key to the novel. During the period in which it is set, the real-life Knox manoeuvred his way into a role as curator of the Surgeon’s Hall Museum where – much later – Burke’s own skeleton would join the collection. The ethics of retention and display of medical specimens are the crux of the case and remain controversial into the present day. Interestingly, there is a tendency today to view the Burke and Hare story as though it was all about ‘medical progress’, whereas doctors like Knox were in it as much for profit and social advancement as the good of humanity.

Outside museums, ‘cabinets of curiosities’ were all the rage at the time, and the feminine equivalent was the baby house. I didn’t see Susan’s house as being infantilising – these were costly women’s treasures – but she does see it as a symbol of her imprisonment, only gradually realising she can use it to form a new allegiance.

WR: I found that one of the most moving chapters was the one from Abigail's point of view - a fictional character we accompany through a hard but successful day of trading that ends in her fateful encounter with Margaret and William Hare. These details of working life lived on the edge of poverty give the novel such colour and texture. The story of Burke and Hare has been recounted many times, but is yours the first to tell it entirely from the point of view of women?

Màiri: Generally the focus is on the murderers although I understand that one Victorian melodrama focused on one of the known victims - Mary Paterson, or, The Fatal Error by David Pae, originally serialised in the Dundee Courier. I don’t think anyone else has ever thought much about Susan, who really fascinated me. How could a man have a secret wife and seven children in a small place like Edinburgh?

WR: Having worked as publisher and editor, how did it feel to be sitting on the other side of the desk as an author?

Màiri: It is quite strange but I am lucky in that my publishers are very understanding and let me be involved in things like the briefs for covers. I hope that having experience on both sides of the desk means that I am not too hard to work with from my publishers’ perspective! I have of course learned immense amounts from working with so many authors I admire over the years (including one Linda Newbery – I think back very fondly on working with your books for Barrington Stoke, including the unusual experience of commissioning an embroidery for the book jacket of Tilly’s Promise!)

WR: (Ah, thank you ... I was so delighted with that cover!) What has been the response to the novel so far? It would make an excellent TV drama or film ... 

Màiri: The response has been very kind. It has been reviewed very positively in the most amazing places, and the Scottish press and booksellers in particular have been really generous. Sometimes it can seem that books set in Scotland face extra challenges south of the Border and I do hope it reaches readers outside Scotland too – I don’t think it’s a country-bound story, much of what it has to say about power and agency (or lack thereof) is really universal. I am also enough of a publisher to know that books must be positioned and its beautiful jacket says ‘women’s fiction’ to me, so I have been especially pleased when it has been reviewed by male readers like Teddy Jamieson in The Herald who have said it spoke to them too.

WR: Finally - will you be writing more historical fiction?

Màiri: I am just finishing the first draft of my next book and yes, it is historical. It hasn’t been announced yet, so I can’t say an awful lot except that it is about a group of people who are generally incredibly well documented, but not for the period about which I am writing. It is set largely north of the Border but links to an iconic work of literature most people do not associate with Scotland at all…

WR: Well, that's an intriguing note to end on! Thanks so much, Màiri, for answering our questions and we hope The Specimens will reach many more appreciative readers.

The Specimens is published by Black & White Publishing.

Guest post by Leslie Wilson: ELIZABETH HEYRICK - THE MAKING OF AN ANTI-SLAVERY CAMPAIGNER by Jocelyn Robson

 

"She wrote in language which is still relevant, if not to the abolition of slavery, certainly to our attitude to the climate crisis."

Leslie Wilson is the author of two novels for adults and three for young adults. Last Train from Kummersdorf was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and the Branford Boase Award; Saving Rafael was nominated for the Carnegie Medal and Highly Commended for the Southern Schools Book Award. The first two deal with Nazi Germany: The War’s Not Over Yet is published as a Kindle e-book and is set at the time of the Russian blockade of Berlin in 1948. Leslie Wilson is half German, was brought up bilingual, and has spent considerable amounts of time in Germany.

1809: A forty year-old woman hears of a bull-baiting that is to take place in Bonsall, in Derbyshire. Appalled, she gets herself to Matlock, two and a half miles distant, tries to get local dignitaries to stop the event. They refuse. By the time she gets back to Bonsall the bull is already tied, and the dogs about to be released. The crowd has been drinking for hours; bets have already been placed. The woman speaks to the crowd, appealing to them to give up their entertainment. She has no success. So she tries something else. She manages to find out who is the bull’s owner and buys the animal from him. The bull is saved. 

In carrying out this action, Elizabeth Heyrick transgressed against the approved behaviour of women at this period; she shouldn’t have been at such an event at all, let alone interfering with the pleasures of men. The story demonstrates her courage and determination, which was to be further manifested through the rest of her life.

She was born in 1769, into a middle-class, dissenting family with radical tendencies. Attractive and elegant, she fell in love with John Heyrick, a descendent of the poet Robert Herrick, and married him at the age of nineteen. The marriage turned out badly. Heyrick, though idealistic, was also a gambler and had a violent, unstable temperament, for which Elizabeth blamed herself, though her family blamed her husband (her brother even challenged Heyrick to a duel because of his treatment of his wife, but nothing came of it).  They spent several periods apart and there were no children. In 1797, she came back from church to find him dead on the floor from a fatal heart attack.

This dreadful shock precipitated her into a period of depression and self-starvation, but she had a supportive family, no financial troubles (though she donated her Army widow’s pension to charity), and a circle of engaged, intelligent female friends, some of whom were Quakers. Though she continued to suffer depression, she found a role in life: campaigning for the oppressed.

Heyrick herself became a Quaker in 1807 (two years before she prevented the bull-baiting) and also probably taught for a while in a Quaker school for girls in York. Quakers were then in what is known as the ‘quietist’ period, and it was rare at this stage for outsiders to become convinced, so Elizabeth was exceptional in this respect also. However, quietism must not be understood as inactivity. Though Quakers had owned slaves in the past, and many of them through their business activities had been connected with the profits of slavery, uneasiness about slavery grew throughout the eighteenth century and in 1772, the American anti-slavery campaigner John Woolman had convinced the London Yearly Meeting of Quakers to include an abolitionist statement in the Epistle which was sent out to British Quakers after that national meeting. Subsequently many British Quakers became dedicated anti-slavery activists, and briefed campaigners such as William Wilberforce.

Women were also permitted to minister during the silent Meeting for Worship, and many of them (including two of Heyrick’s friends) were ‘recorded’ as ministers, which doesn’t mean that they became paid ministers or led the Quaker meeting; simply that they were recognised to have a calling to stand up and speak in the largely silent Meeting. Though women did play a subsidiary role within the Society of Friends, they nevertheless had far more opportunity to speak and be heard than in many other denominations; certainly more than the Church of England, which did not allow women to speak at all. For a woman like Heyrick, the Society of Friends could be seen as a natural home.

She became the author of eleven hard-hitting pamphlets; against animal cruelty, against social injustice in Britain, and against slavery (these all written in the 1820s).

The slave trade was abolished in the same year that Elizabeth became a Quaker, but chattel slavery was not. It was argued that if the trade was abolished, slave owners would be kinder to their enslaved workers, and even that abolition would come about gradually (Heyrick regarded this idea as propaganda on the part of the planters, who were certainly good at protecting their interests). She wrote in language which is still relevant, if not to the abolition of slavery, certainly to our attitude to the climate crisis.

‘The slave-holder knew very well, that his prey would be secure, as long as the abolitionists could be cajoled into a demand for gradual instead of immediate abolition. He knew very well, that the contemplation of a gradual emancipation, would beget a gradual indifference to emancipation itself. He knew very well, that even the wise and the good may, by habit and familiarity, be brought to endure and tolerate almost any thing.’

She was never a woman to pull punches. She wrote: ‘We that hear, and read, and approve, and applaud the powerful appeals, the irrefragible arguments against the Slave Trade, and against slavery, - are we ourselves sincere, or hypocritical? Are we the true friends of justice, or do we only cant about it? – To which party do we really belong,’ – to the friends of emancipation, or of perpetual slavery? Every individual belongs to one party or the other; not speculatively, or professionally merely, but practically. The perpetuation of slavery in our West Indian colonies ... is a question in which we are all implicated.’

During the 1820s, women became increasingly active in the campaign to abolish slavery, and formed their own societies, in which Elizabeth was active. Her pamphlets were, of course, read by the members of these societies. One of the issues which particularly concerned them was the sexual abuse of enslaved women; ‘moral degradation’  was the word used; it was of its time, but everyone knew what it meant. ‘I have known them gratify their brutal passions,’ the freed man Olaudah Equiano writes about the white captors, ‘with females not ten years old.’  

Meanwhile, the national Anti-Slavery Society, with its male membership, was still sticking to the aim of gradual abolition. Eventually, the women had enough.  Prior to the Gentlemen’s Anti-Slavery Society’s annual meeting, they said they would donate £50 (equivalent to around £3,300 today) to that society if they were willing to give up their use of the word ‘gradual’ in their aims. The women’s contribution to the outcome was never (are we surprised?) mentioned, but the society did indeed give up the word ‘gradual’, in spite of objections from William Wilberforce.

 Elizabeth died in 1831, before the 1833 Act was passed which abolished slavery in all British dominions. She would have been outraged at the payment of compensation to the plantation and slave owners, a sum which has only recently been paid off by British taxpayers, but which has enriched many a British family. ‘The slave has a right to his liberty,’ she wrote, ‘a right which it is a crime to withhold – let the consequences to the planters be what they may.’

 Exceptionally among white anti-slavery campaigners, Elizabeth Heyrick regarded the enslaved people as equals, regardless of skin colour.  She defended the uprisings against the planters, regarding them as justified; she denounced floggings and cruel punishments, both in the West Indies and in Britain. She spoke out for a decent living wage for the working classes. Through careful research and an exciting access to a preserved archive, Jocelyn Robson has opened up for us the life of an extraordinary and precious woman. She is to be congratulated.

Elizabeth Heyrick: the making of an anti-slavery campaigner is published by Pen and Sword History.

Photograph by Corinne Lambert

Recently, sculptor Corinne Lambert was commissioned to make this piece, Abolition (Remembering Elizabeth Heyrick) which is now in the permanent collection at Leicester Museum and Art Gallery. The presentation was covered by BBC Leicester - read the piece here. 

Guest review by Helena Pielichaty: THE GIFTS by Liz Hyder

 

"Something extraordinary and haunting ..."

Helena Pielichaty is a children’s writer. She has had over thirty books published, mainly by Oxford University Press and Walker Books.

Website: www. helenapielichaty.com 

A few chapters in to Liz Hyder’s engrossing debut adult novel, a Thames boatman finds a woman’s body: ‘It is not the usual sort that Peter King drags from the murky Thames with his hook. She is older, for a start. Silver hair and pale white skin. She looks in good nick, he thinks to himself, as if she has fallen asleep underneath the waves …’

No, don’t roll your eyes. The Gifts is not another crime story of a hapless female victim and the detective sent to solve the case. This story is different, for the body is different. As Peter King discovers, this dead woman’s body has wings. Seizing the opportunity to make money, King hears that a surgeon is in attendance in his tenement. ‘Might you be interested in a curio, Sir? A body with some distortion to it, perhaps?’

Surgeon Edward Meake is most interested. The corpse is brought back to his basement to be analysed and dissected. As Meake severs the wings, his curiosity is piqued, his ambition ignited. Could this be his chance to make his name? To outshine his rival, the more flamboyant Samuel Covell? When, a little later, he takes possession of another ‘angel’, this time very much alive, his question is answered and his destiny is sealed.

Meake is one of five main protagonists in this multi-narrative, fantasy-reality tale set in 1840. The other four are women: Etta, a botanist, daughter of a deceased free-born Jamaican slave and a wealthy Shropshire landowner. Natalya, a gifted storyteller, forced to leave the serenity of her remote Scottish island to seek, she hopes, lodgings with her cousin in London. Eighteen-year-old Mary, the spirited ward of journalist Jos and the late George, reduced by circumstance to doing piecework by fixing buttons on cards. Finally, there is Annie Meake, Edward’s wife, a talented artist, desperate to conceive. Over the course of the 469-page book, Hyder skilfully nudges these characters towards each other, one powerful voice at a time, until they inevitably converge.

The Gifts is a page turner with a feminist twist. Through the four women’s experiences, we are left in no doubt about the unequal status of women in the mid-nineteenth century, a time when men felt they had ‘God-given’ rights over women and the law supported the notion. Yet it was also a time when women began to rebel against this misogyny. Although such ground has been well covered in fiction and non-fiction (the recent televising of Ann Lister’s diaries, Gentleman Jack, springs to mind as one example), by having two of her characters possess something as supernatural as wings, Hyder is able to explore these injustices in a freshly-imagined way. Wings can be ‘clipped’ and they can be used to soar – metaphors which are played well here.

It is hard to believe this is only Hyder’s second book, so seasoned a writer does she seem. Her first was the highly acclaimed Bearmouth, a dystopian YA novel which won the Branford Boase Award 2020 and the Waterstones Children’s Book of the Year for Older Readers 2020. Hyder makes the crossing from YA to adult seamlessly, bringing with her, perhaps, the caveat of making sure something happens on every page. Multi-narratives risk the reader losing track of the various strands but Hyder avoids this by keeping the chapters short and pacy. The result is something extraordinary and haunting and I applaud her for it. I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.

The Gifts is published by Manilla Press.

SUFFRAGETTES IN FICTION: a round-up by Linda Newbery

A round-up of recent titles and reissues - adult and young adult fiction

Linda Newbery's own contributions to suffragette fiction for young readers are  GIRLS FOR THE VOTE, published by Usborne, and UNTIL WE WIN, Barrington Stoke.  

Perhaps it's surprising that there hasn't been more fiction set during the women's suffrage campaign - offering, as it does, strong roles for women with ample opportunity to show determination and physical courage and to defy expectations. The current centenary - 100 years since the Representation of the People Act granted the vote to women of property-owning women of 30 and over - has seen new publications, but my first choice, Half of the Human Race by Anthony Quinn, first appeared in 2011. I've shown the original hardback jacket here, as the paperback goes for romantic appeal, not even showing the suffragette colours or drawing attention to the theme.

I found this a really absorbing read, excellent on period detail and attitudes to women's roles, especially for ambitious women like main character Constance who wants to be a surgeon but whose family's limited finances are directed to her brother. She's poised to marry professional cricketer Will, but they fundamentally disagree over her campaigning activities and her refusal to promise to obey as part of her marriage vows. Constance goes to Holloway Prison and endures force-feeding but withdraws from the suffragette movement in horror when some of its more extreme supporters begin to use bombs, endangering life. Later, working as a wartime nurse, she goes beyond her role when she intervenes to save a life, at the risk of jeopardising her own career. Characters are strongly and sympathetically drawn, especially Andrew Tamberlain, a famed cricketer at the end of his career. A friend of Will's, he's introduced as a minor character but later becomes a significant ally to Constance, his fate interweaving with theirs in quite unexpected ways. By the end, accompanying them, you'll feel as if you've been on an epic journey.

All three of these novels take us to prison and through the ordeal of force-feeding. In Ajay Close's A Petrol Scented Spring I almost felt I'd been through it myself, so graphic are her descriptions. In a Perth prison, Dr Edward Watson is one of the few doctors willing to force-feed hunger strikers. Such invasive brutality may seem the unlikeliest start to a seduction, but Dr Watson finds himself increasingly drawn to Arabella, the defiant woman he tortures daily; he engages her in conversation, fascinated by her implacable will. The narrative, moving back and forth in time, is shared between Arabella and Donella, Dr Watson's wife, who marries him in 1916 in ignorance of his prison activities. Ajay Close's writing is animated and assured, with occasional humour alongside the grittier details.

In Jon Walters' Nevertheless She Persisted, Nancy doesn't shrink from detonating bombs. One of a pair of sisters, both sexually abused by their father, she takes up work at Holloway as a warden. But, fascinated by glamorous detainee Daisy Divine, an actress known as 'The Duchess', she's soon passing notes between prisoners and eventually finds herself on the wrong side of the cell door after adventures involving subterfuge, disguise, safe houses and the procurement of explosives. Sister Clara, meanwhile, ponders marriage to the too-conventional Ted at the cost of giving up a career in which her ability has been recognised. This novel stops short of the outbreak of war but leaves Nancy relishing the new freedom she's found in her activism and by dressing in men's clothes.

Young adult fiction has seen some excellent new publications this year and last, plus a welcome reissue. Sally Nicholls' Things a Bright Girl Can Do  is a substantial novel interweaving the stories of three young women - Evelyn, May and Nell - and introducing a range of attitudes and class backgrounds. Most suffragette fiction centres on the WSPU, but here's a wider view that identifies the differences between the various organisations. Evelyn joins the WSPU while May, a Quaker and staunch pacifist, favours the East London Federation of suffragettes, Sylvia Pankhurst's campaign against sweatshops and for fair conditions for working women as well as for the vote. Her new friend / lover Nell, from a poorer background, takes up work in a munitions factory for reasons May fails to understand: Nell is trying to support her large family. We follow all three characters through the war and beyond, to the point where new opportunities open up for them.

Sheena Wilkinson's Star by Star is set in Ireland in 1918, but sweeps both back to the war and forward to the new opportunities opening up for capable young women like Stella. Daughter of a campaigner who died in the flu epidemic that follows the war, she's excited by the forthcoming election and determined that no one eligible should miss their chance to vote. Sent to Ulster to live and work at her aunt's boarding house, she befriends a stricken army Captain - thus Wilkinson deftly takes the  reader back to the war years - and makes a discovery about the father she's never known. Readers will strongly identify with the resourceful, well-intentioned Stella and with the practical and moral dilemmas she faces, and will hope that she finds a role to suit her talents.

Julie Hearn writes with freshness and vivacity in Hazel, one of three novels that form an attractive family saga over three generations (though each can be read alone). The dashingly-named Hazel Mull-Dare is the daughter of Ivy, the pre-Raphaelite beauty and painter's model who was titular heroine of the previous book. Here we start with the dramatic death of Emily Wilding Davison in a novel that looks at various manifestations of power, privilege and emancipation.

Teenage fiction as involving and immediate as these three captivating novels will leave young readers in no doubt of the importance of voting as soon as they're of age - even if current political upheavals haven't already convinced them of that.

Finally, here's one for my ever-increasing reading pile: Old Baggage, set in 1928 when the vote was extended to all women but looking back to the suffragette years. It's by the versatile Lissa Evans, who was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal this year with her children's book Wed Wabbit. If anyone's read it, do please leave comments below - also on any other suffragette fiction you'd like to recommend.

Adult fiction:
A Petrol Scented Spring is published by Sandstone Press.
Half of the Human Race is published by Vintage.
Nevertheless She Persisted is published by David Fickling Books.
Old Baggage is published by Doubleday.

Young adult fiction:
Hazel is published by Oxford University Press.
Star by Star is published by Little Island.
Things a Bright Girl Can Do is published by Andersen.

Since this post appeared, Lissa Evans' Old Baggage has been reviewed by Pippa Goodhart.

Guest review by Sheena Wilkinson: BAD GIRLS, A HISTORY OF REBELS AND RENEGADES, by Caitlin Davies

"Bad Girls joins my library of non-fiction about women’s experiences in the past, and I know I’ll return to it many times."

Described in The Irish Times as 'one of our foremost writers for young people', Sheena Wilkinson writes both contemporary and historical fiction for young adults. She has won many awards, including the Children's Books Ireland Book of the Year. Her most recent novel Star By Star, winner of the CBI Honour Award for Fiction, commemorates the centenary of women’s suffrage.

I love fiction, and perhaps best of all I love stories set in institutions. Especially women’s institutions, and especially in the past. I thrill to books about closed communities, with their intense relationships, their special rules, their sense of being worlds apart and worlds unto themselves. My PhD was on fiction set in girls’ schools and colleges, and my work in progress is about a working girls’ hostel, but you could add to that a obsession with convents, hospitals (Call The Midwife scores twice here) and of course prisons. And I am not alone. The success of dramas such as Orange Is The New Black testifies to an abiding fascination with women who break the rules and how society deals with them.

My own first memories of being politically aware involve prisons. I remember the IRA hunger strikes of 1981, and very shortly afterwards seeing women from Greenham Common being sent to prison. This coincided with my learning about suffragette prisoners in the 1910s, so I always knew that prisons were complex spaces. As a student and later as a writer I have spent time working inside prisons, and know that they are places bristling with stories, often harsh and horrifying, always reflecting the world outside as well inside their walls.

So when I heard about Caitlin Davies’ forthcoming Bad Girls, a history of Holloway Prison, some time before publication, I was really excited about it. Because even more than fiction I love social history, especially the history of women’s experience. Sometimes when I feel a bit storied-out I reach for social history as a kind of palate-cleanser. I knew this book was going to tick a lot of my boxes, and when it arrived I was almost scared to start reading it; I had invested so much interest and expectation in it. I’d also rashly agreed to review it for this blog before I even started reading it.

But I needn’t have worried. A quick glance at the contents page was enough to reassure me that this was very much my kind of book, with chapters on subjects ranging from Victorian baby farmers to spies in World War Two, and of course a detailed and horrifying section on the treatment of suffragettes. There are also sections covering sex and relationships, medical matters, and the changing regime at Holloway. The book is comprehensive and thoroughly researched, with a successful balance between telling the overarching factual story of Holloway as an institution and exploring some of the individual characters and events who found themselves incarcerated – or dependent on Holloway for their livelihood. It is dense with detail but always readable and engaging.

Davies writes fascinatingly about the women who worked as warders, and the changing demands of that role from Victorian times until more or less the present day. (Holloway closed in 2016.) I was surprised to learn that many of the wardresses were in fact sympathetic to the cause of suffragette prisoners, though this sympathy was not encouraged, and in fact the opposite was suggested in the press. As Davies says, ‘The press preferred to portray them in opposition to the suffragettes, for… a prison full of inmates and wardresses who wanted the vote was a frightening prospect.’

The book raises important questions about what constitutes crime and punishment, and the extent to which this is determined by changing social mores. Women are particularly vulnerable to this, as their crimes and misdemeanours are sometimes less clear-cut than male crime, and very prone to shifting notions of morality. I had imagined that the prison regime would have been harshest in the nineteenth century, growing gradually more humane, but the truth is more complex than that.

Bad Girls joins my library of non-fiction about women’s experiences in the past, and I know I’ll return to it many times. I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in social history, especially women’s history.

Bad Girls is published by John Murray.

Guest review by Anne Rooney: THE WAVE IN THE MIND by Ursula K. Le Guin

Anne Rooney writes fiction for children and non-fiction for both children and adults. Her adult series Story of… on the history of science now runs to 11 titles. It’s published by Arcturus in the UK and North America and has co-publishers in Japan, Korea, China and South America.

She has never had what might pass for a proper job. After a degree and PhD at Trinity College, Cambridge, she was an academic just long enough to decide it wasn’t the right path and then embarked on a writing career. She has held three posts as Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow, most recently at Newnham College, Cambridge, but mostly just writes, with around 200 books published to date. The most recent is Dinosaur Atlas for Lonely Planet, beautifully illustrated by James Gilliard.

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‘A dragon appears in the field…’

The Wave in the Mind is ostensibly about being a reader and a writer, but it’s just as much about being Ursula K Le Guin. The book is a collection to relish of essays, poems, lectures, musings and literary whatevers on reading, writing and imagination written over a long period. If it isn’t a contradiction in terms—even if it is—it is full of profound musing.

Le Guin wears her keen intelligence and scholarship lightly, but never undermines or undervalues them, never makes light of them. We sense a stern guard against the tendency of women to be reductive regarding their own achievements. It’s underlined by the first essay, in which she describes how she has had to pretend (largely to herself) to be a man in order to grasp life. It is terribly poignant to re-read these lines so soon after her death:

“Here I am, old… I just am young, and then all of a sudden I was sixty and maybe eighty, and what next?

Not a whole lot.

I keep thinking there must have been something that a real man could have done about it. Something short of guns, but more effective than Oil of Ulay. But I failed. I did nothing. I absolutely failed to stay young.”

The pieces are too varied and too many to give more than a flavour here. She muses on why the word ‘non-fiction’ doesn’t appear in the OED (in 1998) in a piece on the value, contingency and fragility of ‘fact’ that could have been written in the post-truth, Trumpian world. She returns again and again to her fascination with rhythm and how she feels this is at the heart of all art that uses language. She pleads for honesty, lyricism and a respect for communicative silence. She unpicks the structure and meanings of traditional tales and of some literary greats, including Huckleberry Finn, in which she locates the novel’s power in the tension between Finn’s character and Twain’s silence about it. There is combative creativity, deep respect for other writers, measured and not always hopeful feminism.

Le Guin is best known, of course, for her sci-fi/fantasy novels. It’s a genre not highly regarded by the literati and in academia. (The depth of thought and clarity of expression in this collection should silence anyone who suggests that writing fantasy is an exercise for intellectual lightweights.) Le Guin was aware of low esteem in which her preferred genre is held, but doesn’t spend a lot of time railing against the injustice of it. Her disappointment is dignified and manages to be quietly shaming—though whether the literati and academics are going to feel ashamed is another matter.

Things Not Actually Present  is a brilliant vindication of the fantasy writer’s art. Le Guin has a knack of making profound points sound so blatantly obvious that they brook no contradiction and we wonder why anyone ever thought otherwise. Fantasy, she maintains, can deal directly with universal themes and truths in ways that realist fiction cannot, because realist fiction is hobbled by its inevitable links to one social group, culture or time. This inevitably makes it less immediately accessible or applicable to others. It is an argument for, and deeply rooted in, inclusivity:

‘Fantasies are often set in ordinary life, but the material of fantasy is a more permanent, universal reality than the social customs realism deals with. The substance of fantasy is psychic stuff, human constants … Society in the decades around the second millennium, global, multilingual, enormously irrational, undergoing incessant radical change, is not describable in a language that assumes continuity and a common experience of life. And so writers have turned to the global, intuitional language of fantasy to describe, as accurately as they can, the way “we” live “now”.’

In her hands ‘we’ and ‘now’ become timeless. In her fiction, she explored with acuity the eternal, bothersome and endlessly fascinating business of being human and in The Wave in the Mind she explores the exploration with equal acuity.

The Wave in the Mind is published by Shambhala Publications.

THE CRIMSON ROOMS by Katharine McMahon, reviewed by Linda Newbery

"While the plot becomes increasingly gripping, the novel never loses sight of its main theme – the pity of war, and the profound effects of loss." 

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. She has published widely for young readers and is now working on her second adult novel.

Set in 1924, The Crimson Rooms is very much concerned with the aftermath of the First World War, with the distinction of featuring a young female lawyer – one of the first of her kind – as its viewpoint character. Evelyn Gifford, at thirty, shares the view of many women of her generation that she is unlikely to marry, and looks to her work for a sense of purpose and the chance to bring about change. She is assistant at the law firm of Breen and Balcombe, where the eponymous Breen is known by reputation as a champion of the poor, and – unlike many of his peers – willing to take on a capable, newly-qualified young woman. Evelyn’s work involves her in two court cases which form the background to the novel.

Since the death in the trenches of Evelyn’s younger brother James, the household in Maida Vale has been exclusively female: Evelyn and her fussy mother, a grandmother and great-aunt. Within the opening pages there are new arrivals: Meredith, a former nurse, and the young boy she introduces as James’ son, of whom Evelyn – but not her mother – has been quite unaware. Although the family’s finances are already stretched, the newcomers must be accommodated; the charmingly capricious Meredith proves to be demanding and unproductive, leaving the boy to be looked after while she attends art classes with new friends from the Slade. To Evelyn, the boy brings touching reminders of her lost brother, and must be cherished. She also sees Meredith as a source of information about James’ last days, as the family has had only sketchy details; but when Meredith eventually does confide in Evelyn, a new shock must be absorbed.

Katharine McMahon's writing gives readers the confidence that we won't be let down. Her portrayals of domestic life (tepid celery soup, lavender and mothballs, limited clothing), class and attitudes are convincing without ever being overdone, and Evelyn is believably a product of her time: intelligent, observant, ambitious but wary, slowly learning to make her way against male intransigence and prejudice. As McMahon points out in an afterword, Evelyn was ‘on the horns of a terrible dilemma – her aspiration to be a lawyer must be at the cost of her clients, who in court would be disadvantaged by the sex of their advocate’. The patronising remarks Evelyn receives from judges and magistrates (addressing the bench, she is asked whether the court "is so lowly that it can be used as the playground in which ladies may conduct a flirtation with the law") would be outrageous today, yet she must weather them and prove herself through doggedness and by trusting her insights. Even so, others in her group of women lawyers challenge her for focusing on the saving of individuals, rather than more riskily making them test cases to bring about policy change.

Evelyn’s two cases are of equal interest. In one, she learns that children placed in care institutions are routinely shipped out to Canada, where (in the guise of ‘home children’) some are treated in effect as slave workers. She is determined that Leah Marchant, convicted of abducting her own baby, should be reunited with her two young daughters before this fate befalls them. Seeds are well-planted for this case to be linked to the other: that of an ex-soldier accused of murdering his flirtatious young wife. Evelyn’s instinct tells her that he cannot be guilty, and it’s she who finds and interprets two crucial pieces of evidence; but McMahon subverts the conventions of murder mystery and courtroom drama with a poignant twist which feels exactly right for the character and situation. Evelyn’s emotions are also engaged by Nicholas Thorne, a young barrister with whom she finds herself falling in love – until she has reason to suspect his motives.

The Crimson Rooms is thoroughly engaging (though the echo of Wilfred Owen’s poem The Kind Ghosts strikes a rare false note, in a letter from James to Evelyn). McMahon seems completely at home in this period – attitudes, even Evelyn’s own at one point, towards rape and shell-shock are very much in keeping – and has created a strong but fallible character with whom readers can readily identify. While the plot becomes increasingly gripping towards the end, the novel never loses sight of its main theme – the pity of war, and the profound effects of loss on survivors and relatives.

The Crimson Rooms is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

See also My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You by Louisa Young