Four 20th-Century Historical Novels

These novels vary greatly in style, but all are set in the 1900s, from the aftermath of World War I through to the end of the century.

The Paying Guests     Sarah Waters     (2014)  Mrs Wray and her unmarried daughter, Frances, live in genteel poverty in 1922 London. Having lost her two brothers in the World War and her father to sadness and bad debts, Frances convinces her mother to take in lodgers. They reconfigure their house and rent rooms to a young married couple, Lilian and Leonard Barber. What starts out as a slow burn of a narrative—describing in detail the constraints of this joint tenancy arrangement—turns into an explosive crime novel. Readers witness a murder and know who the murderer is. But will this criminal be caught? Will the romance that has blossomed in the house be uncovered? Are the British barriers of class insurmountable? Can the miseries of wartime be alleviated? Over the course of 564 pages, there are some dips into melodrama, but the novelist kept my attention to the very end, for the resolutions to these questions.

This Strange Eventful History     Claire Messud     (2024)  The title of this superb historical novel is taken from a soliloquy in Shakespeare’s As You Like It:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages . . .      

. . . Last scene of all                                                                   
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion . . .

This soliloquy about the “seven ages” often comes to mind as Claire Messud recounts seven decades of the lives of the members of the Cassar family (from 1940 to 2010, plus an epilogue back in 1927). The Cassars were originally French Algerians, having dwelt for generations in the North African land that was controlled by France from 1830 to 1962. When Algeria won its independence after a lengthy war, the colonizers were forced to leave the country. They were not warmly welcomed back in France. Many of the Cassar family long for a return to Algeria but have to consider career opportunities elsewhere. They end up all over the globe—Toronto, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Paris, Connecticut, the south of France. No matter where they live, love of family binds them: Gaston and Lucienne; their children, François and Denise; their grandchildren, Chloe and Loulou. The novelist based This Strange Eventful History on her own family’s story, as recounted by her grandfather in a handwritten memoir, and the truth of the story shines throughout, with deeply perceptive probings of each character and striking evocations of each setting and time period. Many reviewers have pronounced this novel Messud’s masterpiece.

The Two Hotel Francforts     David Leavitt     (2013)  In the summer of 1940, Lisbon is about the only port in Europe from which those fleeing the advance of Hitler’s armies can hope to board a ship sailing away from the Continent. It’s a crazy place, full of desperate people waiting for passage out of Portugal. At a café, Pete and Julia Winters meet another couple, Edward and Iris Freleng, and sparks fly. Pete is the first-person narrator of this novel that slowly reveals the state of his marriage and of the Frelengs’ marriage: the compromises, the secrets, the love/hate. Always in the background is the looming threat of the war, which, of course, modern readers know the outcome of. Leavitt’s prose is steamy and sometimes seamy; his plot is propulsive.

The Most Fun We Ever Had     Claire Lombardo     (2019)  I always read the Acknowledgments section of a book before I start on the actual text, and I was surprised to find that when Claire Lombardo submitted this novel to her agents it “meandered beyond the nine-hundred-page marker.”  Whew. I found the published version of The Most Fun We Ever Had to be overly long at 532 pages. But, to be fair, this saga of the Sorensen family is complex, with lots of births and deaths, betrayals and lies, successes and defeats. David and Marilyn are the parents of four daughters, each with her own set of neuroses. The narrative skips back and forth between the 1970s, when David and Marilyn meet and marry, and the intervening years between then and 2017. The Sorensen house is also a character, in a way, with much of the action taking place there, on an actual street in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The dust jacket asserts that the author has joined the ranks of novelists Celeste Ng, Elizabeth Strout, and Jonathan Franzen in her chronicling of modern life. I’d say that Lombardo comes close to these three greats.  

For Indigenous Peoples Day

The Berry Pickers     Amanda Peters     (2023)  In 1962, a group of Indigenous Mi’kmaq people from Nova Scotia, Canada, cross the border to Maine as summer migrant workers. When a 4-year-old Mi’kmaq girl, Ruthie, disappears from the berry fields one August day, her family is devastated. Her 6-year-old brother, Joe, is the last to see her; guilt and regret will shape his entire life. Meanwhile, in a town in Maine, a girl named Norma has recurrent dreams that she thinks may in fact be memories of people she once knew. Over the ensuing decades, the novel shifts back and forth between Joe’s life and Norma’s, until their two stories collide. The injustices visited upon Indigenous peoples are woven into the narrative of their existence—the repressive boarding schools, the employment discrimination. But what struck me even more was the author’s portrayal of the contrast between the Mi’kmaq community and the white community—laughter and light versus gloom and closed curtains. Prepare to weep by the end of this moving novel.

For another take on the Native American experience, here’s a reprise of a review that I posted earlier this year:

The River We Remember     William Kent Krueger     (2023)  “In a town where the hatred from wars long past and wars more recent still had hooks set in so many hearts, was anyone safe?” (341) This sentence from Krueger’s latest mystery novel points to the broader themes underlying his text: the untreated trauma inflicted on millions of soldiers by combat, the racism endured by Japanese Americans after World War II, and the racism endured by Native Americans ever since colonizers arrived in North America. And yet, this novel is still a solid mystery, with many twists and turns. It’s set in the fictional small town of Jewel, in southern Minnesota, in 1958, and starts with the discovery of the body of Jimmy Quinn in the Alabaster River. The dead man had numerous enemies, so the job of the sheriff, Brody Dern, is complicated. The novelist takes us deep into the lives of many of the inhabitants of the town, deftly building character through dialog. A warning for the squeamish, among whom I count myself: the concluding chapters have some gory scenes.

Finally, the relation of Indigenous peoples to the forests of the North American continent is beautifully presented in Annie Proulx’s Barkskins (2016), reviewed here.

Three Intertwined Novels by Colm Tóibín

The Irish author Colm Tóibín has an uncanny ability to get inside the heads of his characters, especially the female characters. The three historical novels reviewed here highlight this talent of his, as well as his plot-driven explorations of everyday life in the later twentieth century, both in rural Ireland and in New York City.

Brooklyn     Colm Tóibín     (2009)  Eilis Lacey is a young woman in 1950s Ireland who is persuaded to set off to work in the United States, landing in Brooklyn. The contrast between the straightlaced, hidebound Irish town of Enniscorthy, where she grew up, and vibrant, pulsating New York could not be greater. At a dance, she meets a handsome plumber from a rollicking Italian American family and falls in love. How Eilis then becomes trapped in a heartbreaking love triangle is intricately plotted to the last page of the novel. (The film version of Brooklyn stars Saoirse Ronan as a pitch-perfect Eilis, and the cinematography is stunning.)

Nora Webster     Colm Tóibín     (2014)  For this novel, Tóibín takes us back to Enniscorthy, in rural southeast Ireland. It’s now the late 1960s, and the title character is a recently widowed woman with four children. Having lost her beloved husband, Nora Webster has to make many decisions on her own over the next few years. Tóibín probes her deliberations. Should she sell the family’s summer cottage? Should she get a full-time job or try to rely on her widow’s pension? How should she deal with her grieving children, who range in age from early teens to early twenties? Nora’s daily life is set against the backdrop of The Troubles, the very violent conflicts between Protestants and Catholics, primarily in Northern Ireland but also spilling over into the Republic of Ireland. (I lived in Dublin in this period and found Tóibín’s local color highly accurate.) Tantalizingly, he mentions in passing Eilis and other characters from his novels Brooklyn and Long Island, and the novel Nora Webster fills in much of the community background for those two novels. Some reviewers consider Nora Webster to be Tóibín’s masterpiece. I didn’t want her story to end.

Long Island     Colm Tóibín     (2024)  It’s now 1976, and Eilis is living fairly contentedly with her husband and two teenaged children in a middle-class neighborhood on Long Island. In the opening chapter of the novel, a man comes to her door and announces that his wife is pregnant with a child fathered by Eilis’s husband. The man vows that when the child is born he will drop it on her doorstep. Eilis struggles mightily with this news, deciding to travel to Ireland at the time of the expected birth. This visit, ostensibly for her mother’s eightieth birthday, is her first trip to her homeland in twenty years. Meanwhile, back in Enniscorthy, the characters introduced in the novels Brooklyn and Nora Webster have evolved in their own Irish way. The return of Eilis to Ireland resurrects many secrets and sets in motion a distressing chain of events.

For the most reader satisfaction, do read these novels in chronological order. I hope you enjoy the work of Colm Tóibín as much as I did!

Author Spotlight: Carys Davies

Yes, I know that this author’s given name is a variant spelling of my given name, but that’s not why I’m putting her in the spotlight for this post! Her novels are short, punchy, imaginative, and . . . strange. Her main characters are loners in lonely places or loners who have embarked on problematic journeys. She can set the scene with a few deft sentences, conjuring up the most outlandish sites. Oh, and she’s garnered a number of literary prizes.

Davies’ first novel, West, was published in 2018.

The plot is preposterous, the characters are peculiar, and the language is spare. Yet this book made my post “Favorite Reads of 2018.” Here’s a slightly condensed reprint of my review from that year:

Davies spins a tale that’s akin to ancient myth, set on the North American continent in about 1815. This was an era when the lure of the western frontier was irresistible to some people living in the East. One of these people is Cy Bellman, a mule breeder in central Pennsylvania, who reads in a newspaper about the discovery in Kentucky of the bones of gigantic animals. Cy convinces himself that living exemplars of these animals still roam in the farthest reaches of the continent, driven west by settlement. Cy, who is a widower, leaves his young daughter, Bess, in the care of his unmarried sister and sets off to the west. He hopes to find some amazing creatures if he ventures a ways off the paths that Lewis and Clark traversed in their 1804-06 expedition through the Louisiana Purchase.

The narrative of West alternates between the experiences of Cy in the wilderness (perils: hunger, animal attack, Indian attack, winter) and the experiences of Bess in Pennsylvania (perils: predatory men, clueless aunt, lack of education). Davies builds tension artfully. She pauses in her rapid narrative sweep for descriptions at moments that capture the extremity of the threats to both Cy and Bess. Here is Cy at the end of his first winter on the road: 

“One night he heard the ice booming and cracking in the river, and in the morning bright jewels of melting snow dripped from the feathery branches of the pines onto his cracked and blistered face, his blackened nose.” (21)

Despite the harsh conditions, Cy continues to be obsessed with getting a sighting of monstrous animals. But there’s also a general wanderlust at work. A central theme of European and American literature has always been the journey, the pilgrimage, the hero’s voyage. Cy’s trip is set against the dangers for stay-at-home Bess. And uniting these two stories is a third key character, who signs on as a guide for Cy: “An ill-favored, narrow-shouldered Shawnee boy who bore the unpromising name of Old Woman From A Distance.” (27)

I was hesitant to dip into this little novel because I was suspicious of a Brit writing about early America. Such foolish prejudice I displayed! Carys Davies has produced an amazing portrait of frontier life circa 1815, but that’s only the backdrop to her exploration of ambition, fear, lust, weariness, greed, and familial affection.

Davies’ next novel was The Mission House, in 2020.

The Mission House is set in contemporary India and features more of Davies’ unconventional characters:  a disabled orphan, a barber who aspires to be a country-Western singer, and a depressive British librarian taking a rest-cure. The Briton, Hilary Byrd, takes up temporary residence with a missionary in a remote hill station and interacts with locals in the household and in the neighborhood. The modern independent India becomes blurred with the old India, under the former British imperialist rule. Hilary seeks to escape England and yet ends up in a place with many British trappings. Beneath the surface, politics seethe.

Davies’ most recent novel is Clear, which came out in 2024.

For this one, I recommend reading the Author’s Note at the end of the book before starting the fiction. Davies explains the “Clearances” of the 18th and 19th centuries in Scotland: “Whole communities of the rural poor were forcibly removed from their homes by landowners in a relentless program of coercive and systematic dispossession to make way for crops, cattle, and—increasingly as time went on—sheep.”

The novel is set in the year 1843, when the Clearances coincided with a major upheaval in the Presbyterian Church in Scotland. A middle-aged clergyman, John Ferguson, unemployed and desperate, takes a fee-for-service job: evicting a lone tenant from a (fictitious) remote Scottish island in the North Sea, as part of the Clearances. The tenant, Ivar, is an unlettered recluse who speaks only Norn, a Germanic language nearly extinct at the time. Soon after being dropped off by a ship passing by the island, John falls down a cliff and is seriously injured. Ivar finds John and cares for him while he recovers, and the two form an uneasy bond, as John struggles with his assignment to remove Ivar from the island.

Meanwhile, back in mainland Scotland, John’s wife, Mary, who was never too keen on his taking the job, gets more and more uneasy. As with Davies’ other two novels, Clear comes rushing to a startling conclusion.

All of Carys Davies’ novels are best read in one sitting, so set aside a few hours to be swept away.

Author Spotlight: Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott has won so many literary prizes that the list would take up this entire post, so I’ll just mention that her novel Charming Billy won the National Book Award for fiction in 1998. Her novels have often been on the New York Times bestseller list, and her short fiction has been featured in such publications as the New Yorker.

McDermott can conjure up New York City in the early-to-mid twentieth century better than any other author I know, and within this area of historical fiction she specializes in creating characters who are Roman Catholic. She isn’t trying to convert her readers to Catholicism but rather to tease out complex ethical questions. How does an ordinary person pursue virtue and decency? How does a adopting a religious framework for one’s life affect this pursuit, for good or for ill? McDermott will make you think hard about questions of morality.

Here are two examples of McDermott’s work set in New York City:

Someone     Alice McDermott     (2013)  In this novel, McDermott gives us an intimate portrait of an Irish Catholic woman’s conventional life, from youth to old age. The beauty here lies in the simplicity and the lovely language.

The Ninth Hour     Alice McDermott     (2017)  This book appears as a favorite of mine in several categories. With wonderfully resonant prose, McDermott presents the pros and cons of being Catholic in early twentieth-century Brooklyn. The neighborhood nuns are often heroines. Click here for my full review.

McDermott’s latest novel departs from her usual locale, with great success.

Absolution     Alice McDermott     (2023)  At the start of the war in Vietnam, the United States sent “advisors”—some of them civilian engineers and some of them military personnel—to southeast Asia. Those in the higher ranks of advisors brought their families with them to Saigon. (Even though I remember the Vietnam era vividly, this possibility had never occurred to me.) Absolution is a fictional story about those wives and children in Saigon in 1963. Tricia/Patsy is a naive young bride who is befriended by Charlene, a mother in her thirties. Charlene is a manipulative woman who dabbles in the black market, among other unsavory pursuits, and she pulls Tricia into her circle. Their story is narrated, looking back from the present day, first by a very elderly Tricia and then by Charlene’s daughter, Rainey. The racism and sexism of the period are presented in unvarnished and realistic detail, as the women muddle along on the edges of a momentous period in the history of both the United States and Southeast Asia. Alice McDermott is at the top of her game, so don’t miss Absolution.  

Category Novels, Part Four: Family Sagas

In my continuing series of posts about various categories of novels that I review on this blog, I’m turning to Family Sagas. In the Family Saga category are novels focused on the lives of characters who are related to each other and who interact over a long period of time. Family Sagas also fall into my category of Historical Novels, since they span multiple generations. They tend to be lengthy novels, suitable for reading on a long weekend or a vacation trip.

Here are four Family Sagas, published between 2016 and 2019, that I especially loved. Click on the title to go to a full review.

Barkskins     Annie Proulx     (2016)  An expansive account of two French Canadian families and their relationship to the forests of North America over three centuries. Love all those trees!

Pachinko     Min Jin Lee     (2017)  A sweeping saga about the struggles of Korean immigrant families in Japan throughout the twentieth century.

Peculiar Ground     Lucy Hughes-Hallett     (2018)  A densely layered novel set on a fictional Oxfordshire estate in 1663, 1961, 1973, and 1989. Features walls—border walls, the Berlin Wall, walls of inclusion, walls of exclusion, and many others. 

The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna     Juliet Grames     (2019)   A boisterous Italian family’s 20th-century immigration saga, starring the women.  

And here is my brand-new review of a very recent Family Saga:

The Covenant of Water     Abraham Verghese     (2023) Take a deep breath and plunge into this sprawling, 715-page family saga. Don’t be daunted by the huge cast of characters and by the many words in the Malayalam language of southwest India. The river-rich, fertile Malabar coast is the glorious backdrop for the story of a girl who, in the year 1900, marries into a farming family in which, for centuries, someone has died from drowning every generation. The novelist is a physician who slowly uncovers the mystery of these drownings. He also weaves in numerous other medical matters by including among the characters a Scottish surgeon employed by the Indian Medical Service and a Swedish surgeon who oversees a colony of lepers. The narrative occasionally sags under its own weight, and under the weight of tragedies, but there’s also plenty of joy and love as the years roll on to 1977.

Three Adventure Tales

The Romantic     William Boyd     (2022)  I had enough of picaresque novels when I taught eighteenth-century British literature decades ago—think Moll Flanders, Joseph Andrews, and Tom Jones. So I wasn’t keen on reading a novel that seemed to land in this genre. Never fear! Cashel Greville Ross, the star of The Romantic, is not a scalawag, and his adventures are seldom sordid. This tale of a fictional man who lived from 1799 to 1882, skips merrily from the west of Ireland to Oxford, to India, to Italy, to Massachusetts, to Zanzibar. The author establishes the story in the history of the period by having Cashel survive the Battle of Waterloo, spend a summer with the great poets Shelley and Byron (plus Shelley’s wife, Mary), and make a dangerous trek to the source of the Nile River. There’s also a grand love affair. William Boyd’s prose has just enough of a nineteenth-century tone to give the novel flavor and not so much as to render it tedious. One chapter bounces to the next for 446 pages of outrageous storytelling.

The Vaster Wilds     Lauren Groff     (2023)  Imagine a Robinson Crusoe tale, but set it in early 17th-century Colonial America. Make the hero a teen-aged female servant who runs away from a settlement of Europeans that is beset by famine and disease. Of course, famine and disease are also what this teenager encounters in the raw and gorgeous wilderness. I kept thinking that the plot of The Vaster Wilds would develop more in the present tense of the story, but instead what plot there is consists of flashbacks to past events in the runaway’s life. This is not a novel that you should read if you are prone to depression, but two elements make the grim adventure tale palatable:  Lauren Groff’s marvelous way with words and the inventive survival tactics that she describes. (I’ve reviewed two other excellent Groff novels: Fates and Furies and Matrix.)

Late Nights on Air     Elizabeth Hay     (2007)  Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories of Canada, sits at 62 degrees north latitude, where the short summers are glorious and the winters are very, very dark. Late Nights on Air starts out slowly, introducing readers to the staff of Yellowknife’s sole radio station, in 1975. The adventure comes in when four of the staff decide to take a six-week canoe trip through the Arctic wilds in the summer of 1976. The adventurers are always on the edge of disaster, facing ice-jammed rivers, back-breaking portages, and a bear attack, but the natural wonders that they encounter leave them in awe every day. Woven through the narrative are romances among members of the ensemble cast, plus a regional controversy over an oil pipeline. I lived in Toronto in the 1970s, so I appreciated many of the cultural and political references in this novel, but even I had to look up a few words. “Dene,” for example, is a general term for native peoples of the Canadian Arctic, who face many of the same issues today that they faced in 1975.

Author Spotlight: Allison Montclair, AKA Alan Gordon

• The First Book in the Sparks and Bainbridge Series

I’ve gobbled up all five books in the Sparks and Bainbridge historical mystery series by Allison Montclair. To catch you up, here’s a re-post of my review of the inaugural book, which you should be sure to read first!

The Right Sort of Man     Allison Montclair      (2019)  In the wake of World War II, women who had taken on substantial roles in the war effort were often expected to walk away from stimulating, remunerative work to become housewives. Recently, a number of nonfiction titles, novels, and films have been exploring the ramifications of this cultural shift. For example, in the PBS series The Bletchley Circle a cast of brilliant (fictional) female codebreakers become freelance detectives, solving murders after the war. On this blog, I’ve reviewed several novels treating the issue of women adjusting to wartime and to the post-war economy and society; see links at the end of this post.

In the novel The Right Sort of Man, Iris Sparks can’t reveal her wartime work because of Britain’s Official Secrets Act, but she clearly was a spy for the Allies. The story starts in 1946, and Iris demonstrates her chops through her contacts in high places, her sharp intellect, and her ability to wield a knife against an aggressor. She has met Gwen Bainbridge, a wealthy widow who was so devastated by the loss of her husband in the war that she was confined for several months to a mental institution and lost custody of her young son. Iris and Gwen decide to become partners in establishing a marriage bureau—Iris to have gainful employment as a single woman, and Gwen to reclaim her place in the world. The services that Iris and Gwen offer are in demand as Britons return to civilian life and seek the comforts of home and family.

Alas, after only a few months of operation, The Right Sort Marriage Bureau loses one of its female clients to murder, and a man whom the bureau has matched her with is charged with the crime. Iris and Gwen have vetted their clients thoroughly and are convinced that the wrong person has been arrested. To see justice done and save the reputation of their firm, they set out to find the real perpetrator. In the course of their investigation, they run into black market gangs finding ways around Britain’s strict war-related rationing laws, which were not fully phased out until 1954.

The action moves forward, and the personalities develop, primarily through dialogue, and that dialogue is quick-witted, reflecting Iris and Gwen’s intelligence and perceptiveness.  These two women have Sherlockian powers of observation and deduction as well as skills in subterfuge and in the discernment of the truthfulness of those they are interviewing. Some complex sub-plotting centers on Iris’s sex life, which is, to use Gwen’s descriptor, “adventurous.”

Who is the novelist? Allison Montclair is a pseudonym for an experienced fiction writer who’s venturing into the 20th-century-mystery genre with The Right Sort of Man. It’s a highly successful venture, capturing the immediate post-war period in London and unveiling the lives of two women who survived and thrived.

For other excellent fictional treatments of women’s roles in Britain in World War II and afterwards, see my reviews of Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs mysteries (2003-present) and of Anthony Quinn’s Freya (2017). On the American side of the Atlantic, check out Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach (2017), and for women in post-war Germany see Jessica Shattuck’s The Women in the Castle (2017).

• The Next Four Books in the Sparks and Bainbridge Mystery Series

Although each of these titles has a separate murder mystery for Iris and Gwen to solve, there are through-lines that develop over the course of the series. Iris tries to figure how her espionage experience will fit into the post-war world, and her romantic life gets more and more complicated. Gwen keeps struggling to have her commitment as a “lunatic” legally reversed, so that she can regain custody of her young son and become independent from her in-laws. In each of the books, post-WWII London is the vivid backdrop. For best results, read the novels in order of publication.

A Royal Affair     Allison Montclair     (2020)  Iris and Gwen are hired to investigate a potential problem with the engagement of Princess Elizabeth to her prince.

A Rogue’s Company     Allison Montclair     (2021)  In another rollicking, intricately plotted mystery, the two protagonists end up in back alleys with desperate criminals.

The Unkept Woman     Allison Montclair     (2022)  Iris’s past associations as a spy for Britain during World War II intrude on her postwar job at the marriage bureau.

The Lady from Burma     Allison Montclair     (2023)  A woman dying of cancer contracts with the marriage bureau to find a second wife for her husband, a renowned entomologist. But is her subsequent death a suicide or a murder?

• About Allison Montclair/Alan Gordon

How did author Alan Gordon became Allison Montclair? Here’s the story: https://www.jungleredwriters.com/2022/07/introducing-real-allison-montclair.html

Under his own name, Alan Gordon has published the eight delightful medieval mysteries in the Fools Guild series. Theophilos and Claudia, a married pair of jesters and acrobats, travel widely and solve crimes in the time of the Crusades. 

From the Middle Ages to 1946 London, Alan/Allison is an author all historical-mystery lovers will want to take a look at.

Historical Fiction Set in the Early 20th Century

This Other Eden    Paul Harding     (2023)  Prepare yourself to be mesmerized by the lyrical language of this short (221 page) novel by a former winner of the Pulitzer Prize (in 2010, for Tinkers). The beauty of Harding’s words contrasts with the sometimes grim plot. Although the book is fiction, it’s very loosely based on an actual historical event: the expulsion of a mixed-race community from a small rocky island by officials from the state of Maine in 1912. Harding paints a picture of life on the island that has idyllic moments but is also hardscrabble, and he doesn’t shy away from describing the genetic consequences of inbreeding and the arguments of the eugenicists of the period. His characters are unconventional but endearing.

The Summer Before the War     Helen Simonson     (2016)  As I’ve noted elsewhere on this blog, I try to avoid historical novels that present graphic scenes of World War I trench warfare. The title of this novel led me to believe that I’d be safe from nightmares. The novel starts in East Sussex, England, in the summer of 1914 (with the best summer weather that anyone can remember), but, alas, toward the end there are disturbing scenes set in 1915 France. By that point in the book, however, I was hooked—and anxious to know what would happen to the characters. Beatrice Nash is an independent, highly educated young woman who comes to Sussex to teach Latin at the grammar school. Hugh Grange and Daniel Bookham are cousins, visiting their Aunt Agatha there—Hugh is a surgeon in training, and Daniel is an aspiring poet. Snout is a local ruffian who is also a brilliant Latin scholar. Surrounding them are an array of often comical English village stereotypes. The descriptions of the far southeastern coast of England are rhapsodic, and the dialog, a la Edith Wharton, conjures up the era.  

The Trackers     Charles Frazier     (2023)  The journey story has been a part of Western literature since The Odyssey, and Charles Frazier is a master of American journeys. (See my review of Varina, and there’s also Frazier’s award-winning Cold Mountain.) The Trackers is set in 1937, with the Great Depression dragging on. Val Welch is a young East Coast painter who, by good fortune, is commissioned to create a mural for a post office in Wyoming. Val’s hosts for his stay in the West are a wealthy rancher and art collector, John Long, and his wife, Eve. Val is busy with the laborious process of painting in the ancient fresco style when he’s enlisted to help find a missing person, and he leaves his art work to travel to Seattle, to Florida, and to California. Trackers feature in Val’s mural, and he himself becomes a tracker. In first-person narration, he recounts getting beaten up (caveat: violence) and also acquiring an education in human greed and passion and struggle. The characters in this novel are exquisitely drawn, and the scenes of the American West are breathtaking. Example: “Wyoming felt clean and brittle, the light fragile as a flake of mica, the high air rare enough to be measured in the lungs and appreciated in its thinness, its lack of substance.” (188) As a bonus, the jacket art, by Tom Haugomat, beautifully evokes the travel posters of the period.

More Historical Novels

Four novels, set in four different periods of the twentieth century. (To read additional reviews of historical novels, click here and here.)

• The World War I Era

The Bookbinder     Pip Williams     (2023)  I’ve been avoiding novels set in the trenches of World War I because the blood-and-guts horrors are just too much for me. But The Bookbinder takes place in placid Oxford, England, focusing on the women left behind, with a few letters from a nurse in France. Peggy and Maude are twin sisters who work in the bindery of Oxford’s highly respected university press. Maude has disabilities that make this repetitive work ideal for her, but Peggy is bored, wishing for much more intellectual stimulation. When Belgian war refugees arrive in Oxford, a romance element to the plot emerges, to intersect with the story of Peggy’s quest to attend university. The pace of this novel is slow, with descriptions of the minutiae of daily life and details of hand bookbinding, but hang in there. The action picks up, and weighty themes (women’s rights, the morality of war, the treatment of the disabled) emerge. A companion novel to The Bookbinder is Pip Williams’s bestselling The Dictionary of Lost Words. Watch for a review of the latter in an upcoming post on this blog.

• The World War II Era

Beyond That, the Sea     Laura Spence-Ash     (2023) First, my minor quibbles: a few language inaccuracies and a lot of coincidences. Those noted, I really liked the unusual plot and the well-drawn characters in this novel. At the start of World War II, Beatrix Thompson, age 11, is evacuated from war-ravaged London. Unlike some British child evacuees who ended up in rural England with exploitative farmers, Beatrix is sent to Boston to live with the kind and welcoming Gregory family. One of the Gregory sons is two years older than Beatrix, and one is two years younger. Can you foresee a love triangle forming?  She ends up staying with the Gregorys until the end of the war, when she reluctantly returns to her London family. The story travels on until 1977, as Beatrix (“Bea” in the US, “Trixie” in the UK) tries to find her place in the world.

• 1959/2018

Homecoming     Kate Morton     (2023)  You either love Kate Morton’s novels or you gasp, “No way am I slogging through 544 pages!” I slogged through Homecoming, letting myself become fully immersed in the exceedingly complex plot, chock full of Morton’s characteristic flashbacks and secrets and instances of doubtful paternity—and more secrets. Here is the basic outline: In December 2018, Australian-born Jess Turner-Bridges, who has long lived in London, receives word that her beloved grandmother has been hospitalized in Sydney. Jess flies to Australia and accidentally learns about a terrible family tragedy that occurred on Christmas Eve of 1959. We’re off and running! Morton often anchors her novels’ extravagantly wide-ranging plots in spectacular landscapes and/or houses—here it’s the Adelaide Hills and magnificent houses there and in Sydney. Most people have room for at least one Kate Morton novel in their lives. You could read this one, or you could check out my reviews of two of her other family-saga mysteries: The Clockmaker’s Daughter and The Lake House.

• The Turn of the (Most Recent) Millennium

Attachments     Rainbow Rowell     (2011)  Remember the Y2K scare back in 1999? Media hype had us all worried that computers around the world would crash on January 1, 2000, because of the use of two-digit abbreviations for years. Attachments takes place in the years 1999 and 2000, with this Y2K angst as a backdrop. Lincoln, an introverted computer security specialist at a newspaper in Nebraska, is charged with following up on employee emails that have been flagged as possibly inappropriate. He reads lengthy personal exchanges between the newspaper’s copy editor (Jennifer) and entertainment writer (Beth), and he falls in love with Beth, whom he has never met. The pop culture references from the turn of the millennium are nostalgic, and the circuitous route by which Lincoln and Beth eventually get together is hilarious. As I raced through this novel, Rainbow Rowell had me laughing out loud at hundreds of witty emails.   

The Popularity of Historical Novels, Part 2

I posted last week about the publishing trend over the past two decades toward historical novels. This week my focus is a specific historical period: the decade after World War II, a time of immense cultural change, both in a devastated Europe and in the United States, which sent soldiers to the war. I recently read two novels set in the immediate aftermath of World War II.

The Tobacco Wives     Adele Myers     (2022)

In 1946 North Carolina, a war widow dumps her daughter, Maddie Sykes (age 15), at the house of Aunt Etta, in a town totally dominated by the tobacco industry. Maddie is expected to assist Etta with sewing gowns for the wives of local executives, but when Etta becomes seriously ill, all the work falls to Maddie. She rises to the challenge, all the while dealing with a secret that she’s stumbled upon about the harmful health effects of tobacco. (The total obliviousness of the characters to the hazards of smoking seems incredible today, but it was the norm until near the end of the 20th century.) Despite some anachronisms and unlikely coincidences, Myers draws her characters well and propels the plot along with realistic dialog.

Jacqueline in Paris     Ann Mah     (2022) 

It’s a historic fact that Jacqueline Bouvier (later Kennedy, and even later, Onassis) spent her junior year of college, 1949-1950, studying in Paris. Although Europe was still recovering from the destruction of WWII, Paris was magical for Jackie O, as she attested many times. Novelist Mah spins out this year in France, reconstructing and imagining the details, as Jacqueline attends lectures, dances in jazz clubs, falls in love, and encounters the post-war conflicts between democracy and communism. Any fictionalized version of the life of a famous person is risky. This one hits the mark and is highly recommended.

In the archives of the Cedar Park Book Blog I found a number of other novels set in post-WWII Europe. Click on the title to be taken to my review. 

Freya     Anthony Quinn     (2017) The friendship of two British women, traced from the end of World War II through the 1960s, with insights into feminism, marriage, and culture.

The Women in the Castle     Jessica Shattuck     (2017) Hardscrabble life in Germany in the aftermath of World War II, with reflections on the rise of Hitler.

The Italian Party    Christina Lynch     (2018) As effervescent as the Campari-and-soda drinks that the characters order constantly, but the sunny picture darkens as we learn the many secrets of an American couple living in Siena, Italy, in 1956.  

The Right Sort of Man     Allison Montclair     (2019) In post-WWII London, two bright women start a marriage bureau and end up solving a crime. Spunky and sparkly. This is the first in the Sparks and Bainbridge Mystery Series, which includes A Royal Affair (2020), A Rogue’s Company (2021), and The Unkept Woman (2022), all of which I’ve reviewed. For best enjoyment, read the books in order.   

The Popularity of Historical Novels, Part 1

If you look beyond science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels (as the Cedar Park Book Blog does), your options for current fiction reading are weighted heavily toward the historical. Why? This podcast from On the Media suggests a few possible reasons. For example, fiction can draw attention to neglected parts of history. And some authors want their work to be more timeless, not dated by references to modern technology, which changes rapidly.

So it isn’t just my imagination that historical novels have been proliferating for the past two decades! In my scanning of book-lovers’ sites such as The New York Times, BookPage, and Goodreads, I’ve found that history is hot. In particular, there’s recently been a glut of novels about women spies during World War II. I haven’t reviewed many of these spy novels because they’ve proved too violent or sad for my taste—plus I don’t like to get stuck in one time period with my reading.

Over the past six years, I’ve featured a wide range of historical novels and historical mysteries, set from ancient times up into the 20th century. This week, I scoured the Cedar Park Book Blog archives to highlight some of my best-loved historical reads, in random order. Click on the title to be taken to my full review!

News of the World Paulette Jiles     (2016) In post-Civil-War Texas, a traveling performer agrees to make a dangerous journey to deliver an orphan to her aunt and uncle. (The film, with Tom Hanks, is also terrific.)

The Hearts of Men     Nickolas Butler     (2017) Starting in 1962 at a Boy Scout camp in northern Wisconsin, this novel follows a boy’s difficult life in a complex United States.

Where the Crawdads Sing     Delia Owens     (2018) The Marsh Girl roams the lush swamps of coastal North Carolina and meets both friends and foes. Evocative nature prose and a devilish mystery.

Peculiar Ground     Lucy Hughes-Hallett     (2018) A densely layered novel set on a fictional Oxfordshire estate in 1663, 1961, 1973, and 1989. Features walls—border walls, the Berlin Wall, walls of inclusion, walls of exclusion, and many others. 

The Light Between Oceans     ML Stedman     (2012) In the 1920s, a lighthouse keeper and his wife, on a remote island off the coast of Western Australia, find an infant in a boat that washes ashore.  Melodramatic but worth the anguish.

The Golden Age Joan London     (2014) In 1953, two adolescents with polio meet in a rehabilitation center in Perth. A moving story that won top prizes in Australia.

The World Of Tomorrow     Brendan Mathews     (2017) Rollicking action at the fabulous New York World’s Fair, in June of 1939, when the Great Depression has eased and World War II was still unimaginable to Americans.

The Ninth Hour     Alice McDermott      (2017) The pros and cons of being Catholic in early 20th-century Brooklyn. Exploring the intersections of morality, religion, and culture in resonant language.

Little Fires Everywhere     Celeste Ng     (2018) Teens in late-1990s Shaker Heights, Ohio, confront incendiary issues of the upper-middle-class: bigotry, greed, and a disdain for those who diverge from the norms set by their communities. 

Pachinko     Min Jin Lee     (2017) A sweeping saga about the struggles of Korean immigrant families in Japan throughout the twentieth century.

A Gentleman in Moscow     Amor Towles     (2016) The amazing adventures of a Russian aristocrat under house arrest in a Moscow hotel from 1922 to 1954.

The Last Painting of Sarah de Vos     Dominic Smith     (2016) The story of a painting and its impact on families in three settings:  The Netherlands 1636-49 (dark, burgher-ruled); New York, 1957-8 (shiny, jazz-filled); and Sydney, 2000 (sunny, cosmopolitan).

West     Carys Davies     (2018) Preposterous plot, peculiar characters, spare language, in a tale that’s akin to ancient myth, set on the North American continent in about 1815.

Barkskins     Annie Proulx     (2016) An expansive account of two French Canadian families and their relationship to the forests of North America over three centuries. Love all those trees!

Watershed     Mark Barr     (2019) In 1930s rural western Tennessee, an impoverished agrarian community is confronted with technology that will profoundly change lives.

Varina     Charles Frazier     (2018) A fictionalized version of the troubled life of the second wife of Jefferson Davis, set in the aftermath of the American Civil War.

The Vineyard     María Dueñas     (2017)     Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor and Lorenza García A swashbuckling historical romance that travels to Mexico, Cuba, and Spain in 1861.

The Fortunes     Peter Ho Davies     (2016) Interlocking stories about the experiences of Chinese immigrants in America over the past century.

In a special category, four historical murder mystery series:

The Marco Didius Falco Mystery Series and the sequel Flavia Albia Mystery Series     Lindsey Davis     (1989-present) Complex, fast-paced, satirical, and outrageously funny mysteries set in first-century Rome. Bonus: Learn some Roman history and geography.

The Brother Cadfael Mystery Series     Ellis Peters     (1977-1994) Meet the brilliant and compassionate monk Cadfael, who lives in a monastery in 12th-century Shrewsbury, England, tending his herb garden and rooting out evil.

The Dame Frevisse Mystery Series     Margaret Frazer     (1992-2008) Dame Frevisse, a nun at a fictional Oxfordshire convent in the 15th century, is a practical and clever sleuth, solving personality clashes as well as crimes.

The Roger the Chapman Mystery Series     Kate Sedley     (1991 to 2013) Roger is an engaging, burly fellow with a large backpack of wares. He tramps all around England in the 15th century, unravelling mysteries. 

My recent posts on this blog have also had lots of short reviews of historical fiction. For example:

Historical Fiction, 7th Century to 20th Century

Strong Women of Yore

Historical Fiction Sequels That Can Stand Alone

A Woman between the Wars

A Single Thread     Tracy Chevalier     (2019)

I know what you’re thinking: “You’re really recommending a novel about embroidery?”

First off, let’s get the terminology straight. In the early 1930s, when A Single Thread is set, the British term “embroidery” referred to what we now call “needlepoint,” the stitching of yarn through canvas that has an open weave. Needlepoint is used to make objects that are sturdy and practical, as well as beautiful: cushions, chair covers, eyeglass cases, and such.

Second, portraying a group of female needlepoint experts is a clever device that novelist Tracy Chevalier uses to approach a demographic debacle in post-World–War-I England. The war took the lives of about 700,000 British men, mostly young, and maimed many others, leaving a generation of British women without male partners. These were the “surplus women,” and A Single Thread tells the story of one of them, Violet Speedwell.

Violet lost both her brother and her fiancé to the war. At the start of the novel, she’s decided to separate herself from her dour, miserable mother, who has never recovered from the death of one of her sons. Violet sets off on her own to the nearby city of Winchester and works as a typist, barely scraping by financially. Descriptions of her pitiful meals of bread and margarine reveal the day-to-day poverty endured by millions in Depression-era Britain. But Violet is also starving emotionally.

Then she accidentally happens upon the Winchester Broderers, a group of women who carry on medieval traditions (and terminology) by producing exquisite embroidered articles for use in Winchester Cathedral. The Broderers—some kindly, some decidedly not—become Violet’s anchor in an uncertain world. And because she hangs around Winchester Cathedral a lot for meetings of the Broderers, she meets the cathedral’s bell ringers, a male coterie that provides a love interest.

Tracy Chevalier excels in depicting the inner lives of women in difficult circumstances, as she did with great success in her 1999 historical novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring. In A Single Thread, Chevalier again takes on women’s issues of loneliness, servitude, sexuality, camaraderie, and defiance of social norms. Chevalier makes full use of the symbolism of embroidery (read: needlepoint) as redemptive when, in a climactic scene, Violet uses a well-placed embroidery needle to fend off an attacker.

If you love cathedral architecture or bell ringing or needlework, A Single Thread is a must read. If you just love a historical novel with compelling characters, it’s also a must read.

Supportive Siblings

The Dutch House     Ann Patchett     (2019)

The Dutch house of the title is a mansion in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Cyril Conroy bought it for his wife, Elna, in the 1940s, when he amassed a large sum in real estate.  He never asked her if she wanted it before the purchase. (Guys did that back then. Some still do, I guess.) The place was previously owned by a Dutch family, the VanHoebeeks, and their portraits and furniture still adorn it.

Elna hates the opulent life that her husband’s financial success has brought to the family, and she especially hates the Dutch house. She decamps, leaving Cyril with their three-year-old son, Danny, and their ten-year-old daughter, Maeve. (That’s supposed to be Maeve’s portrait on the book cover.) The children are taken good care of by a faithful cook and housekeeper until the wicked stepmother, who covets the Dutch house, and her two daughters enter the picture. Then all hell breaks loose.

Narrated in first person by Danny, The Dutch House skips back and forth in time over a period of half a century, as Maeve and Danny cling to each other and try to come out from under the power of that huge, overly ornate structure. The reader can’t help but have sympathy for two people who struggle with the fact that their mother deserted them basically because she couldn’t stand to live in the Dutch house, which their father wouldn’t give up. Or was that really the reason?

Small recurring themes, such as the repeated attempts of Maeve and Danny to quit smoking, enliven the story. “Maeve always said I smoked every cigarette like I was on my way to my execution, and I was thinking this really should be my last one. I knew better, even though those were still the days when doctors kept a pack of Marlboros in the pocket of their lab coats.” (277)

Ann Patchett delivers her usual assured narrative line as her highly believable characters ponder issues of forgiveness, revenge, and the bonds of family. Maeve and Danny are remarkably self-aware, despite their many questionable life decisions. Here’s Danny again: “There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you’re suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself.” (121)

I’ve reviewed a previous Ann Patchett novel, Commonwealth, here. Patchett has legions of diehard fans, and The Dutch House will certainly be on their request lists. It’s also a very good choice for those unfamiliar with Patchett’s novels.

Rural Tennessee in the 1930s

Watershed     Mark Barr     (2019)

You can smell the summer heat. Or maybe that’s the sweat and the outhouses and the dust rising off the rutted dirt roads. Rural western Tennessee during the 1930s comes to life magnificently in this novel in which an impoverished agrarian community is confronted with technology that will profoundly change lives.

Although it’s never cited by name, something like the Tennessee Valley Authority is the federal program that descends upon a hardscrabble farming area anchored by a small town, several hours’ drive outside of Memphis. Nathan McReaken, an electrical engineer with a cloudy employment history, arrives to work on a massive hydroelectric dam project. The Great Depression is winding to a close, but all Nathan knows is that jobs are still perilously scarce. His secrets must be stuffed out of sight if he’s to survive an overwhelming workload, a mean-spirited and capricious supervisor, and the Southern heat. Remember, there’s no electricity in his boarding house room to power even a fan.

While Nathan is the consummate outsider in this tale, Claire Dixon is the local. Her hunk of a husband, Travis, works on one of the crews building the dam. When his sex-on-the-side ends up infecting Claire with a sexually transmitted disease, she takes their two children to her mother’s place and goes to recover her health in town with her aunt, who runs the town’s boarding house. Will Claire find a job to support herself as a single mother? Will Nathan’s past cost him his job? Will Nathan and Claire strike up a romance? You get to caring a great deal about these two, whose lives are on the edge of transformation.

The minor characters are equally engaging. Claire's Aunt Irma runs her boarding house with tough love. A seedy moonshiner named Freitag becomes Nathan’s unlikely friend. The unctuously repulsive Robert Hull has the task of signing reluctant farmers up for the electric grid. And a red-haired farm boy who looks forward to light bulbs in his family’s modest home weaves through the plot.

But that heat—expressed in a hundred tiny details, like clothes clinging to the back or hats used to fan the face—pervades everything, conjuring up the rural South in this pre-electric era. “The July afternoon had swelled into full being, the heat pouring over the low hills, finding its way even into the shaded places. It was inescapable, and the day brimmed with the billowing, hot air.” (263) The heat really stokes up the intensity, so that you can place yourself in that rural site of dam construction. Then the characters and the plot development fill it all in.

For fans of historical fiction, Watershed is a winner.

My own grandparents were beneficiaries of the Rural Electrification Act of 1936. Read about them, and about American technological progress, in my review of the nonfiction The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J Gordon. For another novel set in the rural South, try Brad Watson’s Miss Jane.

WASP Privilege

The Guest Book     Sarah Blake     (2019)

Ah, to be mega-rich, rich enough to buy an island off the coast of Maine, complete with house and outbuildings. But then . . . What if you bought that island to cheer up your wife after a terrible family tragedy had plunged her into despair? What if the funds with which you paid for the island were secured through collaboration with Nazis before and during World War II? What if the island became a burden to your grandchildren, who couldn’t afford the upkeep?

In this multifaceted family saga, spanning four generations of the Milton family, we first meet Kitty and Ogden Milton in New York City in 1935. Ogden’s financial firm has somehow been insulated from the Great Depression, and life is very, very pleasant, until a shocking death occurs. Hence in 1936, Ogden buys Crockett’s Island for a song, and the family summers there every year, creating beloved traditions, especially involving sailing and the eating of lobsters. WASP privilege reigns, though pockets of sadness creep into the story. In one scene, for example, potential victims of the Holocaust visit the Miltons from Germany and ask for help. And, as with many families, long-held secrets can pop up unexpectedly to unsettle  assumptions and alliances.

The novel toggles back and forth, touching on the experiences of Milton family members in the 1930s, in 1959, and in the present day. The scenes from the summer of 1959 prove most consequential. Moss, an adult son of Ogden and Kitty, invites to Crockett’s Island two of his New York friends—one Jewish and one African American—causing bigoted opinions to surface and tensions to build toward the climax of the saga.

The language of The Guest Book is often lyrical, particularly in passages describing the natural beauty of Crockett’s Island. The dialogue feels authentic, and the plot twists and turns satisfyingly. Readers may think that novelist Sarah Blake occasionally gets a little preachy as she presents the racist views of the Miltons and their wealthy friends, but frankly, in the time before the Civil Rights movement, discriminatory segregation was the norm for both blacks and Jews. With racist views on the ascendance in much of the world today, Blake’s demonstration of the toxic, generation-spanning consequences of such views is especially valuable.

(Non)Fictional Mathematicians

The Tenth Muse     Catherine Chung     (2019)

The nine Muses of ancient Greek mythology, all daughters of Zeus, traditionally provided inspiration for many different arts, from dance and music to history and lyric poetry. Catherine Chung tells us that, in addition to the nine Muses, there was once an unheralded tenth Muse, a woman who “did not wish to sing in the voices of men, telling only the stories they wished to tell. She preferred to sing her songs herself.” (1) The tenth Muse gave up immortality and came to inhabit the bodies of millions of women on earth who told their own stories. This novel is about one of those women, a mathematician of extraordinary abilities who speaks in first-person narration.

Women are distinctly a minority in the field of higher mathematics, where an academic can spend an entire career seeking to solve a single major mathematical problem. The character Katherine in The Tenth Muse comes of age in the 1960s, when mathematics was even more male-dominated than it is today, and she confronts exclusionary policies head on.

Complicating Katherine’s life is her heritage: it’s especially difficult to grow up in the mid-20th century in small-town Michigan when your father is white and your mother is Chinese. Katherine’s parentage turns out to be even more complex than the obvious mixed-race issues presented in her childhood. She’s determined to sort out her ancestry, and a graduate fellowship to study at a German university gives her access to first-hand information.

Katherine’s path, both in her mathematics career and in her ancestry search, winds and twists in unexpected directions. In reading The Tenth Muse, I occasionally thought that the turns of plot were not true to life. But then I remembered my own meandering path in academia, which no one could have predicted at the outset of my career.

Surely it’s not a coincidence that the given name of the narrator of The Tenth Muse is almost identical to the given name of the author of the novel. Novelist Chung  holds a degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago, so she knows the field of mathematics, and she draws into the story many real-life mathematicians. But she doesn’t overwhelm ordinary readers; she invokes mathematical terms only in broad strokes, so readers don’t have to drill down with the experts.

Do some of the scenes in The Tenth Muse reflect discrimination and harassment that Chung herself has suffered? Is the novel a call for mathematicians to wake up to the #metoo movement and clean up the discipline? A couple of statements by the character Katherine help to answer these questions:

• “I was so used to my perpetual status of outsider that I’d stopped questioning in each situation whether this time it was my femaleness or my Asianness or the combination of both that branded me different. Even now, I feel impatient when asked about what being these things mean to me—the expectation that because my race and my gender are often the first things people notice about me, they must also be the most significant to me. When I die, I know the first sentence in my obituary will read, ‘Asian American woman mathematician dies at the age of X.’” (162)

• “Here was the problem: I was ambitious. I wanted a career. I wanted accolades and validation. More than anything, I wanted to do something that mattered. At a time when it was unseemly for a woman to want these things (is it really so accepted now?), I wanted them desperately. I went after them openly.” (233)

In one scene, when young Katherine meets a female Nobel laureate, the older woman says to her, “’Life’s not fair . . I could have spent my time fighting the unfairness of it all, or I could dedicate my time to science. There wasn’t time for both.’” (119) This is the quandary that many women face.

I’ve reviewed quite a few books about exceptionally bright women, including Chemistry by Weike Wang, Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan, The Idiot by Elif Batuman, and Today Will Be Different by Maria Semple.

Ordinary Women in History

Tidelands     Philippa Gregory     (2019)

Philippa Gregory is best known for her 2001 historical novel The Other Boleyn Girl, which was twice made into a film. Throughout her long writing career, Gregory has fictionalized the lives of prominent women from the history of Britain, sometimes in the face of criticism that she’s distorted the facts. (Yeah, probably, but who knows the facts for certain, and Gregory’s books have always been labeled “fiction,” and, uh, Shakespeare.)

With Tidelands, Gregory embarks on a new series, “tracing the rise of a family from obscurity to prosperity,” as she explains in her Author’s Note. Her protagonist, Alinor Reekie, is both obscure and fictional, a wisewoman—a midwife, a healer, an herbalist—who poses a threat to the patriarchal religious beliefs of the seventeenth century, especially those of the censorious Puritans. It’s 1648, during the English Civil War, pitting Royalists who support King Charles against Parliamentarians who want to abolish the monarchy. This political polarization is overlaid on Catholic-Protestant religious polarization at a time when it was highly dangerous to be a Catholic in England.

Alinor is swept up in these national disputes that she cares little about; she’s mainly concerned about her status as neither wife nor widow, since her abusive sailor husband has disappeared. As the novel opens, she’s waiting in the graveyard of the local church at midnight on Midsummer’s Eve, when ghosts are reputed to walk. She hopes to see the ghost of her husband, to confirm that he’s dead. Instead, she meets a living man, James Summer, a high-born Catholic priest seeking a safe house in the area. She doesn’t yet know that he’s involved in a dangerous plot against the Parliamentarians, who are the dominant party in the tidelands, a marshy area on the southern coast of England.

Tidelands launches slowly, with plenty of atmospherics appropriate to a graveyard at midnight and plenty of exposition to set the political scene. But readers surely sense the frisson between Alinor and James from this very first meeting of theirs. She guides him along boggy pathways to the home of secret Catholics who will shelter him. Then the story turns to Alinor and her two young teen children, who scrape by on odd jobs and the occasional payments that Alinor gets for attending births.

There’s some lovely prose here, evoking the setting: “[James] shivered with distaste. He felt that he could not bear the ugliness of these people’s lives on the very edge of the shore, with their loves and hates ebbing and flowing like a muddy tide, with their anger roaring like the water in the millrace, with their hatreds and fears as treacherous as the hushing well.  . . . He wished himself back with his own people, where cruelty was secret, violence was hidden, and good manners more important than crime.” (190-1)

Tidelands also carries a strong message about the oppression of women, especially poor women, pithily expressed by an elderly seller of lace at the Chichester market: “’It’s a crime to be poor in this country; it’s a sin to be old. It’s never good to be a woman.’” (244) The male characters in Tidelands tend to be exploitive, gossipy, and fickle.

Since Tidelands is the first novel in a planned series, Philippa Gregory leaves readers with a “to be continued” feel at its close. I’m hoping that we hear more about the indomitable Alinor in the next book. Citing Gregory’s Author’s Note again, “For much of English history women have been legal nonentities. But they always lived as if they mattered. Alinor is a woman like this.”

For another novel about a strong woman living in marshlands, see my review of Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens.

Mysterious Places and People

The Clockmaker’s Daughter     Kate Morton     (2018)

All of Kate Morton’s trademark writing techniques are on display in The Clockmaker’s Daughter, especially her explorations of the linkages between places and the people who inhabit them. As usual, Morton leaps fearlessly from one time period to another, requiring her reader to keep track of innumerable interrelated characters, and her mystery tale turns on a modern-day character’s discovery of a piece of history.

Elodie Winslow is an archivist in 2017 London who is tracking the origins of a leather satchel that she dates to the 1860s. The satchel contains a photograph of a striking woman as well as a sketchbook with a drawing of house by a river. These objects will weave in and out of The Clockmaker’s Daughter, as will a large and valuable diamond. Elodie’s intuitive sense that she knows the house leads her to investigate the contents of the satchel far more than her job requires. And so the novel loops back to the nineteenth century, when the owner of the satchel, Edward Radcliffe, was an up-and-coming British visual artist whose fiancé was shot dead in an apparent robbery at his country house, Birchwood Manor, on the Upper Thames in the Cotswolds.

Ah, here’s the mystery, here’s the enticing location. But the novelist is not content to have Elodie discover her connection to Edward directly. Instead the story draws in many other inhabitants of Birchwood Manor, including a ghost. I’m not usually a fan of ghost stories, but I tolerated this ghost, who is Birdie Bell, a contemporary of Edward. The novelist’s device functions to give the reader an observational view of the activities in Birchwood Manor over the many decades since Birdie, the daughter of a clockmaker, came to haunt the house.

For example, at the end of the nineteenth century, a young girl named Ada lives in the house when it’s briefly converted to a school. In the 1920s, a scholar named Leonard visits as he researches a biography of Edward Radcliffe. During World War II, a woman named Juliet and her three children escape to the house when their home in London is bombed. All these characters, and many others, have their own subsidiary mysteries, and all the stories form a complex nexus. If you’re a reader who delights in such complexity, Kate Morton is the writer for you. She doesn’t provide pages of family trees, as some family sagas do, but figures you can keep all the characters straight in your head.  Do the 482 pages occasionally bog down? Sure, but when your attention starts to flag, Morton bustles you off to another storyline.

Anglophiles, take note that the archaeological history of England, the sense of the ancient inherent in every locale, is strong in The Clockmaker’s Daughter.

• Ada discovers fossils: “Every relic they unearthed came with a story, a secret life led long before the object reached their hands.” (165) 

• Leonard “felt a greater connection to the ancient people who’d tracked the very paths across the land that he followed now than he did with the bright young things dancing the nights away in London. He was aware as he walked of belonging; in an essential way he knew himself to be of the earth, and with each footstep he drew further solidity from it.” (217)

• Juliet muses on timelessness of the Thames: “No matter what else was happening in the world, regardless of human folly or individual torment, the river kept flowing.” (288).

Kate Morton’s novels are sui generis, with drawn-out, elaborate plots that are highly reliant on coincidence and unexpected connections over the course of history. Places—homes and natural environments—anchor them. 

For more Kate Morton, see my review of The Lake House, her 2015 mystery novel. Or check out another writer of historical mysteries, Diane Setterfield.