Foundling Stories - Stacey Halls and Rose Tremain by Judith Allnatt

In 1747, in a fine room at the splendid buildings of London’s Foundling Hospital, Bess Bright holds her one-day-old baby girl. Alongside other mothers, Bess draws a ball from a bag in a lottery held to decide who will win a place for their child as a pupil. This game of chance is played out under the eyes of invited benefactors, wealthy ladies and gents, who witness the show of human drama. Thus starts ‘The Foundling’ by Stacey Halls. 

In 1850, a baby, wrapped in sacking is abandoned at the gates of a wintry park in London where she is scented by wolves from the Essex marshes. She is found by a policeman, who hears the wolves’ howling and takes her to the Foundling Hospital. Thus begins ‘Lily’ by Rose Tremain. 

A separated family is a powerful engine to drive a story and perhaps the most poignant separation of all is that of a mother and baby. Stories of ‘foundlings’, babies found abandoned by parents or handed over in desperation to foundling hospitals, start with this heart-breaking premise and immediately fire the reader with a strong desire to see parent and child reunited. For me, this desire would probably be enough on its own to keep me reading but the two books above offer so much more in their examining of the relationships of adults caught up in the drama.

Receiving day at the Foundling Hospital. Wellcome Images

https://wellcomecollection.org/works/fgqknntr

In ‘The Foundling’ poverty and the shame of illegitimacy force Bess to give up her baby, Clara. Like other brokenhearted mothers, as well as leaving the baby’s name and details at the hospital she leaves a token to identify her – half of a heart made of whalebone given to her by the baby’s father. All kinds of things were used as such tokens: slips of paper, embroidered ribbons, rings and pierced coins. Then if the mother were able to drag herself out of poverty and also save enough to pay a fee to the hospital for the child’s upkeep (a difficult feat), even when the hospital had given the child a new name they could be sure of reclaiming the right child by describing the token they left with them. 

Token on Marchmont Street, Author: Matt BrownNo changes made https://www.flickr.com/photos/londonmatt/53413014277/

                                  

The story takes a leap and the stakes are raised when Bess, after six years of scrimping, returns to claim her child only to find that a stranger has claimed her the very day after Bess had placed Clara in the hospital’s care. Avoiding spoilers - the exploration of what it is to be a mother deepens as the two women are brought up against each other. The genius of the book for me is the way in which Stacey Halls balances the representation of the needs of the two women so that despite the reader’s natural urge to see mother and daughter reunited there is also feeling for the damaged woman who has claimed Clara. This creates powerful dramatic tension and pulls the reader’s emotions in different directions, resulting in a gripping read that one can’t put down.

The Foundling Restored To Its Mother 1858 painting by Emma Brownlow
  1858. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

 

In 'Lily', subtitled ‘A Tale of Revenge’, Rose Tremain writes of poverty, cruelty and crime in Victorian London. The infant Lily is first placed in a loving foster family but is then wrenched away and returned to hardship as a pauper at the hospital. Now, as an adult, Lily has committed a murder and lives in fear of discovery. Tremain holds back the nature of the murder and the identity of the victim, masterfully managing the dramatic tension and creating a mystery that kept me turning the pages into the night.
However, the truly fascinating thing for me was the relationship between Lily and the policeman who rescued her as a baby. She feels he may hold the key to her salvation but she dare not confess to him for fear of the rope.

Tremain writes with all her usual subtlety and feeling, imbuing everyday objects with the emotional charge they hold for her characters so that they become powerful symbols of love and loss: a scarf that Lily knits for her only friend at the hospital, a deep, black well at the farm where Lily was happily fostered that comes to symbolise her worst fear of discovery and execution.

One of Tremain’s great strengths is that she looks unflinchingly at human darkness whilst still maintaining a feeling of authorial empathy and understanding. This novel moved me to tears – it is heartrending, compassionate and brilliant.

To find out more about the fascinating history of the Foundling Hospital and see examples of the tokens left by parents, do visit https://foundlingmuseum.org.uk

Book Review: Susan Major, Female Railway Workers in World War II - by Fay Bound Alberti

In last month's blog I interviewed Susan Major, the author of the book I am reviewing today: Female Railway Workers in World War II. Readers also had a chance to win that book, by answering what two jobs were banned to women on the railways. The answer was engine drivers and firemen - the latter being responsible for stoking the engine.

Women's exclusion from those roles brings us to the heart of the story of Susan's book: women were required to work traditional men's role during the war, just as in other sectors, but ideas about gender and femininity held sway.

On 9 March 1941, the Minister of Labour Ernest Bevin appealed for 100,000 women to enrol for war work in Britain, in fields, factories and railways - to replace the men who had been sent off to war. In 1940, the railway companies and the National Union of Railwaymen had already agreed to employ women, albeit at 4 shillings less per week for the same jobs. Support for childcare was available, with government contributions to allow women to work outside the home as well as keep the home fires burning; the presumption was that two women would be needed for every one man. By the end of the war the reality was almost reversed.

This wasn't the first time women worked the railways, Susan points out - there were female railway labourers recorded in the 1851 census; others policed turnpike gates. But the roles that women took on during World War I had been mainly public roles: goods and passenger porters, parcel porters, ticket collectors, carriage cleaners and clerks. Cleaning carriages had traditionally been viewed as men's work, even though cleaning was gendered; interestingly another reason women were not employed as carriage cleaners was that the role was usually 'the first step on the ladder to be an engine driver' (p.3), a carefully guarded male role.

Gang of plate layers at Bristol West 1943 (from University of Leicester special collections)

By the time World War I ended, there were nearly 70,000 women in the railway workforce and some came back during World War 2. In 1942 the number of women on the railways was over 80,000.

Susan's book weaves together some wonderful anecdotes about women on the railways - taken from the National Archive of Railway Oral History - with media reports of the time to explore the tensions between perceptions of femininity, economic necessity and war time need. Whether women could carry heavy loads for instance, was discussed in the Nottingham Evening Post (1942), when a local fishmonger complained his kippers were about to be condemned by the government inspector. Though they had been cured in the north of Scotland, transport delays had led to their deterioration - he said it was because women worked as porters yet couldn't manage heavy loads.

In December 1940 the London Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) reproduced a poem by Robbins Millar that used the term that 'porteress' to marvel, rather patronisingly, at the new phenomenon of women carting suitcases:

The Porteress

She'll be spry as a sparrow

At hurling a barrow

An absolute ace

At yanking a case

You'll never get waxy [bad-tempered]

She'll find you a taxi 

Respond to your yell

Like a dashing gazelle;

And charge no extortions

For chipping large portions 

In lumps and in chunks 

Of your holiday trunks. 

Women porters loading parcels onto a train, 27 February 1941 (Daily Herald Archive/Science & Society Picture Library)

These observed accounts are set against lengthy extracts from women's own stories in Female Railway Workers, under chapter headings that track the women's own journeys: Getting in; Learning the Job; working with Men; Doing a Man's Job to 'Surviving Air Raids', 'Tricky Situations' and - of course - 'And then the Men came Back'. Nellie Nelson, for instance, a London and North Eastern Railway (LNER) porter at York, told the story of an 'awful parcel foreman:

He was a bit of a nuisance, so we cured him one day. you know, laxative chocolate you can buy in Boots? Well, we bought him some of that. we was all on number nine platform and we asked, 'Give you a bit of chocolate Tommy?' 'Aye' and he got some of this and said, 'You're a nuisance you lot I'm having no more chocolate off you lot'. 

Women talk about their love lives, the lack of toilets, their friendships, the dangers they encountered, and the families they lived with. Women working on the railways were subject to the same hard work as men, alongside juggling life on the domestic front, and challenges specific to their sex and the inequalities of the time: sexual harassment, unequal pay, media sensationalism and precarious employment. There were positive things too: a sense of camaraderie with other women, interesting and diverse work, control - to some extent - over their rhythm of work (at least compared to women in munitions factories) and the acquisition of a wide range of skills.

The idea of the 'railway family' also created a paternalistic sense of belonging, and of commitment and obligation to its fellow members. Many went on to marry railway men, continuing their association with the 'railway family' even after they had left their roles.

There had been local union resistance to the idea of female labour in the early part of the war, with concerns about the role of men and the nature of the hierarchy that was in place. But the Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act 1942 laid down that women would be required to give up 'men's jobs' in order to accommodate returning soldiers.

Hard physical labour in 1941 for Southern Railway (Planet Pix Ltd - Planet News/Science & Society Picture Library)

Susan's book brings us the voices of women in an industry previously overlooked by most historians. Women working on the railways challenged myths of femininity and weakness and demonstrated their ability to learn new skills, work together,  undertake hard physical labour and endure difficult, often dangerous conditions.

This book is an important addition to the history of women in wartime and beyond.

Female Railway workers in World War II is available at Waterstones and all good book shops.

Yet another XMAS book round-up.

Sorry folks, it's yet another Christmas book round-up! This year, thanks to my monthly review column in The Times, and my chairing of judging panel for the Historical Writers' Association (HWA) Gold Crown award, I think that I have read more than 120 works of historical fiction. That is a hefty dose of swords, togas and corsets. This is an entirely personal, subjective taste of my favourites.

Some of these books were technically published in 2016, due to the way the awards were structured. But let's not quibble. There were some incredible books out there, by some talented writers. Rather than the usual structure of these lists, I thought I'd give a chronological flavour of my favourites this year.

Ancient Greece.

OK. So I'm starting with something entirely cheaty here, because these books have been out a while. But this was the year I discovered Christian Cameron's Long War series. Starting with Killer of Men, this covers the Persian Wars, through the eyes of Arimnestos, a Platean warrior. Cameron has that rare gift of making history seem vividly real. Mary Renault meets CS Forester

Ancient Egypt

Emily Holleman continues her spirited portrayal of the House of Ptolemy in The Drowning King. This is a beautifully written and fascinating series – and if it feels a little melodramatic, blame the source material. It deserves a wider audience.

Ancient Rome

Ben Kane is one of the masters of Roman military fiction. I have loved his most recent trilogy which began with a massacre of Roman legionaries in the Teutoberg Forest. In March, he brought the series to a close with Eagles in the Storm. Lucius Tullus, who survived the original massacre, is determined to discover his legion's lost eagle. Arminius is refusing to let the dream of crushing Rome die. An enthralling end to the series.

Vikings

For the Odin-lover in your life, the obvious choice is the complete works of modern skald, Giles Kristian. His book this year, Wings of the Storm is the last in a trilogy about revenge and honour, as Sigurd Haraldson seeks to avenge his murdered family. Violent and compelling, with one of the best battle scenes I have ever read.

I also very much enjoyed Theodore Brun's novel A Mighty Dawn. Part Viking, part fantasy this is a big, fat and entirely satisfying fireside read.

Middle Ages:

Kingdom Come by Toby Clements is the concluding book in a four-part series about the War of the Roses which should be required reading for all fans of historical fiction. It is 1470. Katherine and Thomas, the ordinary couple whose lives have been buffeted by the ongoing war amongst England’s nobility, are drawn back into the fighting. A fitting end to an unmissable series.

SD Sykes continued her wonderful medieval crime series in City of Masks. Her hero Oswald de Lacy is pulled into a new mystery, but this time in the deceiving, beautiful surrounds of Venice.

Rennaisance

Disclaimer: I adore Sarah Dunant. But I particularly love her two books about the Borgia family. Beautiful, dense prose and an extraordinary story collide in the second one out this year, In the Name of the Family.

Second disclaimer, as much as I love Sarah Dunant, there is a second writer of Rennaisance Italy who is just as good but does not get as much oxygen. If this fascinating era of art, money and power is your reading heaven - and how could it not be? - read all the works of Philip Kazan immediately.

Early Modern

Bernard Cornwell rather bamboozled his fans this year by bringing out a book with no swords, no battles, no blood and few beards. Fools and Mortals is the story of William Shakespeare's younger brother - a jobbing actor in a lively, theatrical London. Funny, playful and great fun.

Angus Donald kicked off a new series with the utterly delicious Blood's Game - the adventures of a young and peculiar hero in the court of Charles II.

And I wrote one too set in Cromwell's London - The Tyrant's Shadow. It's not bad.

Eighteenth Century

Squeezing in (it is set in 1799!) is Andrew Martin's new crime novel Soot. A shade painter is found dead, and a young debtor is released from gaol with a mission to find the murderer. Inventive, erudite and vivid. We were also treated to Birdcage Walk, the last novel by the late, great Helen Dunmore: a stunning portrait of a failing marriage and the sad erosion of the great ideals of the French Revolution.

Nineteenth Century

I was very taken with a debut Australian writer, Lucy Treloar, whose book Salt Creek portrays a family's struggles in the wilds of South Australia. A riches to rags tale, which takes a stark look at racism and failure. A second Australian debut was Sarah Schmidt's fantastic See What I have Done, a dark, claustrophobic and macabre take on the infamous Lizzie Borden murders.

The HWA prize for histfic went to Ian Maguire for his tale about whalers, The North Water. I urge you to read this brutal but brilliant story about murder and man's descent into darkness. Also on the shortlist was The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry, a wonderful book about ideas and monsters set in the Essex marshes.

Early Twentieth Century

This year I discovered Abir Mukherjee, who writes marvellous crime novels set in colonial India. In A Necessary Evil, Captain Sam Wyndham becomes embroiled in the political wrangling between a tenacious colonial Government and the Indian princely states.

World War 2

Stephen Uhly's Kingdom of Twilight was translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch and released in January. An unflinching snapshot of the war and its aftermath, in which the shooting of an SS officer by a young Polish Jew reverberates through the decades.

Sarah Day's outstanding debut Mussolini's Island revealed the little-known story of the fascist oppression of gay men. Her well-drawn protagonists are sent to prison island where they must grapple with betrayal and fear.

I also loved William Ryan's mesmerising novel The Constant Soldier, another HWA Gold Crown shortlistee. Inspired by the pictures of the Auschwitz rest-camp, where genocidal SS officers enjoyed jolly downtime, this is a heartbreaking, haunting novel.




Some of the best historical fiction reads have also been amongst the most feted and publicised this year: among these are Robert Harris' Munich; Jennifer Egan's Manhattan Beach and George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo. What have been your best reads of 2017?

@tonisenior
antoniasenior.com

At First Light by Vanessa Lafaye: Review by Katherine Clements

Vanessa Lafaye’s new book At First Light returns to the world captured so beautifully in her 2015 debut Summertime. Set in the Florida Keys in the early 20th century, it is a prequel of sorts, but the novel stands alone. Again Lafaye has chosen to base her story on real history, this time an unsolved murder by the Ku Klux Klan in 1919. Here’s the blurb:

1993, Key West, Florida. When a Ku Klux Klan official is shot in broad daylight, all eyes turn to the person holding the gun: a 96-year-old Cuban woman who will say nothing except to admit her guilt.

1919. Mixed-race Alicia Cortez arrives in Key West exiled in disgrace from her family in Havana. At the same time, damaged war hero John Morales returns home on the last US troop ship from Europe. As love draws them closer in this time of racial segregation, people are watching, including Dwayne Campbell, poised on the brink of manhood and struggling to do what's right. And then the Ku Klux Klan comes to town...

Inspired by real events, At First Light weaves together a decades-old grievance and the consequences of a promise made as the sun rose on a dark day in American history.

At First Light is a deceptively easy read. Lafaye’s effortless prose drew me in instantly. I could feel the sultry heat, smell the lush greenery (and the abundant filth!) and sense the pulsing tension of a town seething with poverty, corruption and racial resentment. Lafaye is brilliant at creating flawed but sympathetic protagonists and in Alicia Cortez gives us a captivating, complex female lead. The artful split narrative does exactly what it should – though I suspected I already knew the end of Alicia’s story and a ‘happily ever after’ was unlikely, I was desperate to know what happened. But the ease with which I slipped into her story belies the depths of this novel.

Billed as ‘an epic love story and an unsolved murder’, I’d say the latter – both the events leading up to it and the eventual act of vengeance – is the real heart of this tale. Lafaye has clearly done her research and the sections dealing with the Ku Klux Klan are compelling and unsettling. A major thread concerns well-meaning young man Dwayne, who struggles to find his place in a world heavily influenced by his white supremacist father. Dwayne is attracted to the Klan’s message, couched as it is as a righteous cause for the greater good. Parallels with modern extremism and political polarisation are strong but Lafaye leaves enough space for us to make our own links and cast our own judgements.

There’s plenty of ‘real history’ for the geeks too, some of which is explained in an enlightening Author’s Note along with some suggested further reading. I’m a fan of novels that fictionalise little known events and build something entirely new from slight evidence. Asking the ‘what if’ question is part of the fun of writing historical fiction after all. Lafaye has brought a divisive forgotten moment in American history to light and has done so with sensitivity and respect. 

At First Light is much more than ‘an epic love story’. It gives us a glimpse into a turbulent America on the brink of Prohibition, the experiences of troops returning from the horror of the WWI trenches, the devastating outbreak of the Spanish Flu, the Jim Crow culture of the Deep South and deeply ingrained attitudes that, some would say, still exist today. Lafaye makes all that accessible and thought-provoking with a remarkably light touch that doesn’t get bogged down. The story moves at pace but never feels hurried, matching the languid, tropical atmosphere. A perfect summer read, if you want depth and darkness alongside your romance.

At First Light is out on 1 June 2017, published by Orion.

Find out more about Vanessa at her website.

Katherine Clements is the author of The Crimson Ribbon and The Silvered Heart.

www.katherineclements.co.uk

www.facebook.com/KatherineClementsBooks

@KL_Clements

Stories of Inspiration (historical fiction writers trace their journeys from starting point to finished work) - review by Joan Lennon

Stories of Inspiration

(historical fiction writers trace their journeys

from starting point to finished work)

edited by Suzanne Fox

I've been looking forward to receiving this book (whose production was a little delayed by Hurricane Matthew) enormously.  Partly because I have a piece in it - who doesn't look forward to seeing a book they're in?  But also to read the other essays in the collection, which introduces some writers who are new to me, and some I know well.  In particular, three History Girls -

Michelle Lovric, in The Venetian Novels, writes "No matter what I think I'm going to write about, Venice always snatches the lead role in my novels."  She then takes us on an informative and entertaining walk around that most seductive of cities.  

Sue Purkiss tells us about a series of serendipitous encounters and discoveries that lead to her writing the story of Alfred and his daughter Aethelflaed in Warrior King.  

Celia Rees writes about "the deadly spores of fear and superstition" out of which Witch Child and Sorceress grew.

And I find myself being interviewed about Silver Skin by someone who seems to know me quite well.

The back story of novels and their creation is always fascinating, and I would thoroughly recommend this anthology to readers and writers of historical fiction.

(Well, I would, wouldn't I.  But it is extremely interesting!)

Stories of Inspiration is available from Amazon.co.uk here and Amazon.com here.

Joan Lennon's website.

Joan Lennon's blog.

Silver Skin.

The Lighthouse Stevensons - a review by Joan Lennon

"Scotland is moated by an awkward brew of conflicting tides and currents."  Truer words were never written.  And in The Lighthouse Stevensons, Bella Bathurst tells the tale of what the Stevenson family, over four generations, decided to do about it.

"For several long centuries," she writes, "lives lost at sea were seen by much of Europe as so much natural wastage.  Accounts still exist of sailors watching slack-handed from the gunwales while one of their colleagues drowned.  Once a person had fallen overboard, so the thinking went, he had been claimed by the sea, and it was not for mankind to challenge that claim."

But challenge it the Stevensons did.  Starting with the Bell Rock, a killer reef of rock only clear of the sea at low tide but just a few feet below the waves at high tide, they began to build lighthouses.  If they didn't know how something was to be done, they experimented.  If a tool for a job didn't exist, they invented it.  Lenses and reflectors, dovetailing and cement mixtures, studies of wave patterns and how to drill through sea rock - it was all, as the family's most famous son Robert Louis Stevenson later wrote, a "field that was unexplored; the engineer must read with his own eyes the face of nature ... [and] undertake works that were at once inventions and adventures."

Chronicling the lives and works of four generations of the Stevenson family, with their penchant for re-cycling first names, was always going to be a challenge, and I found it hard to care for some members as much as for others.  But as well as the fascinating historical details of lighthouse building in the 18th and 19th centuries, Bathurst also presents an intriguing series of complicated relationships between fathers and sons (including a repeating, worrying tendency of the younger generation to commit poetry) with sympathy and insight.  The final victim to literature was Robert Louis Stevenson, who tried his best to be an engineer, and then a lawyer, before the ultimate rebellion into writing.  But he never rated himself against the achievements of his fore-fathers.  "Whenever I smell salt water," he wrote in 1880, "I know that I am not far from one of the works of my ancestors."  And in 1886, "all the sea lights in Scotland are signed with our name ... I might write books till 1900 and not serve humanity so well; and it moves me to a certain impatience, to see the little, frothy bubble that attends the author his son, and compare it to the obscurity in which that better man finds his reward."

Bella Bathurst has done an excellent job of lighting that obscurity.    

J.M.W. Turner's Bell Rock Lighthouse (1819)

I was keen on lighthouses before I read this book.  Now you can forget keen.  Obsessed is much more the word.  Have a read of Bella Bathurst's The Lighthouse Stevensons, and you may very well join me.


P.S.  I don't always notice the newest books.  And The Lighthouse Stevensons has been around since 1999, so hardly hot off the griddle.  But that had no effect on the enjoyment! 

P.P.S. The 1823 instructions for the Bell Rock Light-keepers also makes for interesting reading, and you can have a look at it here.

P.P.P.S. And if you fancy a little youtube experience of lighthouses and big waves, try here. Ever so slightly heart-stoppingly magnificent, wouldn't you say?



Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
Silver Skin.

Cowboys and Indians by Katherine Webb

Yesterday, I finished reading Sebastian Barry's Days Without End, one of the books I was given for Christmas. It is simply breathtaking. The book recently won the Costa Novel of the Year award, and I hope it goes on to win the overall Book of the Year prize too. Every now and then, a historical novel comes along that picks you up and drops you down right in the past, like a perfect magic spell, so that reading it is like being there. Hilary Mantel did it with Wolf Hall; Andrew Miller did it with Pure, and Sebastian Barry does it with this book.

By chance, Barry's setting is one I've long been interested in: The American frontier in the nineteenth century - the 'Wild West', as myth would have it. And what a culture of myth and legend there is, surrounding that extraordinary period. The relentless pursuit of land and better fortune by early European settlers on that continent provides a truly astonishing chapter in the book of human history - but of course it came at immense cost to the indigenous population. I find it hard to read about the shoddy treatment of the American Indians by the settlers without my blood boiling at the injustice of it all. But more of that in a moment.

I heartily recommend Barry's new novel to you all, whether you're interested in the history of the USA or not. Whilst his magic trick of sending the reader back in time is one I wish I could emulate with my own fiction, the book is a treasure trove for readers, regardless. There are jewels of prose on every page. To prove it, I am going to open the book at random now, and quote a sentence or two:

'Third day a big thunder storm and it only a huge song singing of our distress. Hard to get the darkness out of your head. Full ten thousand acres of dark blue and black clouds and lightning flinging its sharp yellow paint across the woods and the violent shout and clamour of the thunder. Then a thick deluge to speak of coming death.'

Stunning. Our narrator is Tom McNulty, a young Irish man driven to emigrate by the famine in Ireland, and his narrative describes his life as soldier and settler in the Indian Wars and the American Civil War in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Previously it had been easy for me, when reading about the actions of soldiers and officials in the Indian Wars, to condemn their brutality as a symptom of the racism and greed of a previous generation. Barry's book, however, says important things about what can happen, and what a man will do, if he is made worthless to society, if he has no stake, and no chance of betterment. It says important things about the human heart -  its capacity for love and tenderness as well as the damage done to it by violence and fear. It is an astonishing feat of fiction writing, and brilliant bit of myth-busting for anybody whose mental image of American history comes from Hollywood films.

As I mentioned, I have been interested in early American history for quite some time. I even had a stab at writing about it myself, in my first novel The Legacy, which featured a greenhorn New York girl getting married to a rancher and moving to Oklahoma Territory in the early years of the twentieth century - and all the many and lastingly devastating ways in which she does not cope in her new life. I acquired a number of very good books on the subject of the 'Wild West' as I did my research, and hear are four of the best, in my opinion:

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. Written in 1970, this book perhaps marks the start of the revision of American history. The subtitle, An Indian History of the American West says it all. Brown has written here a damning, heart-breaking history of every bloody battle, every broken promise, every casual cruelty and ignored treaty of the Indian Wars. The terrible inevitability with which an entire race and culture was near eradicated is documented here - whether the Indians were beaten in battle by the sheer numbers of white settlers and soldiers, or were starved, or were herded by treaty to lands they did not know and could not thrive upon. This book exploded the myth of the plucky cowboy protecting his family against the marauding savages. A harrowing but important read. Dee also wrote Wondrous Times on the Frontier, a fascinating collection of anecdotes about life in the early West, told first-hand by the men who were there.

Sand in My Eyes by Seigniora Russell Laune. Something easier to read but just as interesting. This memoir, first published in 1956, tells of Laune's early life in the rural town of Woodward at the turn of the twentieth century. The back of the book praises its exuberant representation of 'the pioneering spirit that civilized the West'... But, of course, Laune is blameless in living her life at the time and in the place she was dealt, as we all generally must. Her memoir moves away from the very early days of settlement to the beginnings of the modern era in what was still very much a spit-and-sawdust town, and gives an engaging portrayal of the trials of domestic life for women back then. Tellingly, it makes almost no mention of the Indians at all, though Woodward was in Oklahoma Territory, which lagged behind the rest of the States, developmentally, because it had remained set aside 'Indian Territory' for several decades - until the pressure of white settlement grew too much.

The Virginian, by Owen Wister. The novel that spawned an entire genre, The Virginian was written in 1902, by which time the West was more or less tamed, no longer a frontier, and the myth of the heroic, gun-toting, ranch-building cowboy had been born. Here we have the strong, silent man, carving his own destiny out of the wilderness; the virtuous, brave woman he loves; the romance of the sweeping landscape, and what I believe to be the first ever depiction of a quick-draw gun duel in the main street of a Western town. Very interesting to see how stories begin to be told, and how they can then grow and spread.

The Real Wild West by Michael Wallis. Published in 1999. This book combines a fascinating history of the vast 101 Ranch in Oklahoma - which at its height covered 110,000 acres, operated its own trains and had its own oil refinery, schools, churches and postal service - with a history of the birth and perpetuation of the myth of the American frontier. The 101 Ranch created the first ever touring 'Wild West Show', which became world famous, and featured real life figures like Geronimo and Buffalo Bill in what must surely, to them, have felt like surreal theatrical representations of their own lives. The book is packed with detail and anecdote, is hugely informative on early settler and farming life, and can be read for sheer enjoyment as well for an insight into the way in which the bloody, difficult history of a nation can have its heartbreak and suffering sanitised, repackaged and sold to the masses.

A Great Olympian by Katherine Webb

I hope you'll forgive a somewhat truncated post from me this month - it is holiday season, and by the time this goes live I shall be sunning myself (and reading voraciously) on a beach many miles away - hurrah! The only thing bothering me slightly about this holiday is that its dates coincide exactly with the Olympics in Rio.

I love the Olympics. It's the only sporting event I watch even more assiduously than I watch Wimbledon fortnight, and that's normally not a problem - the British weather being what it is, I don't generally feel bad for skulking around the TV instead of being out in the world. I can't do that on holiday, though... Well, maybe just the highlights show. So my blog this month is the review - or rather, the recommendation - of a book about a truly remarkable Olympian, Louis Zamperini.

Louis Zamperini in 1938

Laura Hillenbrand's 2014 book, Unbroken, tells the life story of this remarkable man, born to Italian parents in the USA in 1917, and a resident of California. From a childhood on the wrong side of the tracks, Louis became a college track superstar, setting a new intercollegiate record for the mile at a smidgen over 4 minutes 21 seconds. He qualified to represent the USA in the 5000m at the 1936 Olympics, and though he didn't finish in the medals, his final lap was so fast - just 56 seconds - that the Führer asked to meet him, and so Louis Zamperini met Adolf Hitler in person.

World War II broke out, and in 1941 Zamperini joined the US Army Air Corps. In 1943, he was on a B24 bomber called The Green Hornet, and known to be faulty, when it crashed into the Pacific Ocean some 850 miles south of Hawaii. Louis and two other crew members left alive after the crash managed to survive 47 days adrift at sea in an inflatable life raft, only to arrive at the Marshall Islands and be taken into captivity by Japanese soldiers, where they would remain until the end of the war. Zamperini's account of the treatment he and other POWs received at the hands of the Japanese guards, and in particular a man called Mutsuhiro Watanabe, is painful but important reading.

Mutsuhiro Watanabe during the war. He was notoriously brutal; feared and loathed by the prisoners under his jurisdiction.

Laura Hillenbrand, who also wrote the bestseller Seabiscuit, has turned this man's incredible life into an accessible, compulsively readable story of survival and triumph against all odds. I read it in conjunction with Richard Flanagan's Booker-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, about the plight of POWS forced by the Japanese to build a railway across Burma during WWII - commonly known as the Death Railway. Both books are shocking, compelling, and heart-breaking; beautifully written in their very different ways, and give a valuable insight into the depth to which war can plunge men. But in this Olympic month, it's Louis Zamperini, who died in 2014 at the age of 97, who gets my loudest cheer.

Anna Mazzola, Interview and Review by Katherine Clements

Every now and then a debut novel comes along that stands out from the crowd. The Unseeing by Anna Mazzola is one.

Sarah Gale is a seamstress, prostitute and single mother, incarcerated in Newgate Prison, sentenced to hang for her role in the murder of Hannah Brown. Young, ambitious lawyer, Edmund Fleetwood, is appointed to investigate Sarah’s petition for mercy, yet she refuses to help him. Convinced that Sarah is hiding something, and unable to understand why she won’t act to save her own life, Edmund must discover what really happened on the night of the murder. In the process, he discovers some unsetting truths.

The exact details of the Edgeware Road Murder – a real murder case that became a press sensation in 1837 – remain shady to this day. Sarah, convicted of aiding and abetting James Greenacre in the gristly crime, refused to defend herself, stating only that she knew nothing of it.

Sarah Gale’s silence during her trial and incarceration is fertile ground for a novelist and Mazzola, a criminal justice lawyer, has clearly relished both the research and the possibilities. Real testimony and newspaper clippings are weaved throughout. Sometimes such embellishments can detract from a story but here they add depth to it. Mazzola’s legal background shines through too, especially in the character of Fleetwood, whose pragmatic approach to finding the facts is soon challenged.

It’s hard to believe this is a debut novel. Mazzola’s prose is wonderful and the characters are complex and convincing. The cleverly woven plot is revealed gradually with tension maintained right up to the closing lines. Sarah is particularly well drawn; fascinating, frustrating and sympathetic by turns, echoing Fleetwood’s experience of her as she refuses to help him prove her innocence.

I particularly enjoyed the gritty depictions of poverty stricken 19th century London and its injustices (reminding me a little of, among others, Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White or Sarah Waters’ Affinity). The depiction of Newgate prison, with its harsh conditions and reprehensible inmates, is particularly visceral. But for me, the book's message about the position of women at the time stood out as one of the strongest themes. Without legal or financial rights, many women’s lives were determined by men. As such, Sarah could come across as a victim, but Mazzola avoids this, ensuring that Sarah finds a way to choose her own fate, even if it’s a shocking one, as she offers up a plausible and satisfying solution to the mystery.

This is a novel that raises questions about the nature of truth, secrets and manipulation, the lies we tell ourselves and what we choose to believe. And it’s a gripping read. If you like your historical crime beautifully written, intelligent and genuinely moving, this is one for you.

Anna kindly agreed to answer a few questions about the book:

Where and when did you first come across the story of Sarah Gale and what was it that fascinated you about her story?

I first heard about James Greenacre and the murder of Hannah Brown in the Suspicions of Mr Whicher. The crime is mentioned only briefly, but seized my attention as it took place in Camberwell, not far from where I live. However, when I read the Old Bailey transcript, I realized this was Sarah Gale’s story. She was accused of helping Greenacre to conceal the horrific murder of another woman and yet she said virtually nothing throughout the entire trial. Her barrister gave a short statement on her behalf saying that she was not in Camberwell at the time of the murder and knew nothing of it afterwards. Very little is said to combat the various claims that are made against Sarah or to deal with the different pieces of evidence that are offered up. Given she was facing the death sentence, I thought that was very strange. What was really going on?

You must have done quite a bit of research into the case. Did you make any surprising discoveries or have any 'aha!' moments?

I did a huge amount of research – that’s always the most fun part, isn’t it? – and had quite a few ‘AHA’ and ‘OMG’ moments, but I’m afraid I can’t tell you about most of them without spoiling the plot. I was unnerved to learn that James Greenacre had left Sarah his spectacles. I suppose glasses at that time were valuable, and it was perhaps an act of kindness, but he doesn’t seem to have been a kind man. Far from it. I wondered if it could have been a message: a warning that he was still watching.

Sarah could be considered a victim – due to her treatment by men, the courts and the press – but she doesn't come across like that at all. Was the issue of women's rights or legal position at the time in your mind when creating her?

Yes, because I think it’s an important part of Sarah’s story and what ultimately happened to her. This was an era in which married women had no legal personality of their own, and when wives who had committed crimes under the influence of their husband were judged to have a defence due to apparently having no mind of their own. At the same time, women who committed crimes were judged to be particularly abhorrent as they were subverting the feminine norm. They were angels or demons – there doesn’t seem to have been much in between – and the other characters in The Unseeing have pronounced views on which they think Sarah is. Sarah of course knows that, and works with what she has.

Without giving away any spoilers, do you think your background as a lawyer helped or hindered you in creating a fictional solution to the crime?

It was definitely a hindrance. It took me a long time, and several beatings from my agent, before I was able to move away from the ‘facts’ and produce a narrative that anyone would actually want to read. I’m of course used to working with real cases where facts are all-important, so it was difficult for me to accept that I had to let go of factual accuracy in order to achieve a different kind of narrative truth.  It’s part of the reason that one of the key themes of The Unseeing is truth and deception.

What's next? Can you tell us what you're working on now?

I’m currently writing my second historical crime novel, which is set on the Isle of Skye in 1857. It’s about a young woman who goes to work for a collector of folklore and discovers that a young girl has gone missing, supposedly taken by spirits, although of course that’s not what she believes. Again, the idea was sparked by a real case, but given my difficulty with leaving ‘the facts’ I haven’t tried to base it on the case in the same way that I did with The Unseeing. I may, however, return to that format for book three. Just to make things difficult for myself.

The Unseeing is out on 14th July and Anna will be our History Girls guest this month. Look out for her post on 29th July!

www.katherineclements.co.uk

www.facebook.com/KatherineClementsBooks

@KL_Clements

Review of The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow

The Clockwork Sparrow is a lively adventure for 9-12 year old readers, by Katherine Woodfine, set in Edwardian London, in a world that was rapidly changing. There are omnibuses, an American tycoon is opening a department store and threats of war are rumbling in the distance.

I'm probably late to this one as there is a sequel out on February 25th, but I read it over Christmas and enjoyed it. I loved the portrayal of a city in the process of such huge change, including the widening opportunities for young women. 

The main character Sophie, an orphan, gets a job at the new department store Sinclair's. She's really happy there preparing for the grand opening and making friends right up until there is a break in and she is blamed. Sophie loses her job, but determined to solve the mystery of who stole the clockwork sparrow, she turns detective.

As an adult reader, I was less interested in the plot than in the portrayal of the time and place, but the story moves along at a fast pace. I really enjoyed the fashion details, newspaper clips, illustrations and the feeling that this was all very real (even though the actual department store is fictional). Of course Sophie and her friends solve the mystery and save the day, but there was plenty of mystery around Sophie herself which wasn't revealed, so I'm hazarding a guess there will be more to come in the next books.

I'd really recommend this to anyone who has children to buy books for (or wants to read it themselves, of course). I hate to be superficial, but I should also mention it has a lovely cover.

Review by Marie-Louise Jensen

Follow me on twitter: jensen_ml

Favourite Finds by Joan Lennon

Charity shops - second-hand bookstores - you never know what you might stumble across in them.  Books you didn't even know existed but that still somehow manage to draw your eye from in amongst all the other titles on display.  I'd like to tell you about just one of the books that did that to me, and now lives on my own book shelves:

Peter Goodfellow's Shakespeare's Birds 

illustrated by Peter Hayman

published in 1983 by Kestrel Books

This is not an earth-shattering book.  It is not a weighty, academic study.  It is gentle and unassuming, with the flavour of a pleasant conversation about it.  

The illustrations are detailed and thoughtful.

I learned some stuff I didn't know - like, for example, some of the old country names for birds, such as ouzel for blackbird, throstle for song thrush and puttock for the red kite.  Some of the conventions and stories Shakespeare would have drawn on in his use of bird imagery I knew, such as the swan who only sings as she dies, or the barnacle goose being born from barnacles and therefore being okay to eat during Lent (because it was technically a fish ...)  But others were new to me - the kingfisher, for example (known as the halcyon as in halcyon days) was thought to build its nest out of fish-bones, floating on a calm sea.  And a dead owl, nailed over a door, kept evil away.  

But it isn't at heart an I'm-going-to-teach-you-stuff book.  What it boils down to is, Goodfellow really likes birds, and he really likes Shakespeare, and he hopes you do too.  And the one thing Shakespeare's Birds achieved above everything else was to remind me of just how utterly mellifluous the plays and sonnets are.  It made me want to go back and re-read them.

So thank you to the second-hand bookshop I found this book in, and here's to many more pleasant surprises in the future.  What would I quite like to find next?  Well, J.E. Harting's The Ornithology of Shakespeare critically examined, explained and illustrated, published in 1871, and listed in Goodfellow's "Suggestions for Further Reading" would be nice.*

And how about you?  Tell us about your favourite finds, in the random and serendipitous world of charity and second-hand bookshops - the books you maybe didn't even know existed, that now have a new home on your book shelves.


Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.


(*After typing those words I had a bash at googling Harting's book and lo and behold, I can read it on the Guggenheim online archive here - so that's my distraction for the day organised, without even leaving the house!)