'Emmeline'

Oh, man! What a blisteringly angry and epic novel this is! Emmeline by Judith Rossner has sat on my to-be-read pile for a few months and I was finally spurred to bump it to the top this week by the news that the brand new Persephone Books for Spring are soon to be issued and I am therefore falling behind in my Persephone reading. And despite being a hefty 409 pages long, I rattled though Emmeline in a mere 48 hours - such was my inability to put her down. 

Originally published in 1980, Rossner's sixth novel is a furious tour de force set in 1800s America, following the life of our shero Emmeline Mosher. Born as the eldest daughter in a large, working-class family in the small pioneering town of Fayette (a real town located in Maine), aged just 13 Emmeline is sent nearly 200 miles away to work in a cotton mill in Lowell, Massachusetts - because her destitute family is depending on her paltry income ($1 a week) for their survival. 

Just a child, our 13-year-old protagonist has no knowledge of the world. She is a naive and young girl with nobody looking out for her welfare, so she clings to her Bible and her code of good behaviour to protect her honour. Desperately homesick and feeling out of place in Lowell, being several years younger than most of the other mill girls, when her employer Mr Maguire shows kindness, of course young Emmeline responds. The child is desperate for someone to pay her attention... which the loathsome Maguire certainly does after getting her drunk and dazzling her with the luxuries of his home. 

It's hardly a spoiler to say that 13-year-old Emmeline becomes pregnant, despite having no concept of how babies are conceived nor of what the man 27 years her senior is doing to her (save only for the horrifying comment that because it makes him happy, she doesn't mind him doing it: "She did not understand precisely what had happened between them, though she knew that it was wrong because he had taken off some of her clothes. She had been uncomfortable - even briefly in pain - but none of that had mattered when measured against his holding her, his kissing her, his speaking to her affectionately ... The guilty feelings wouldn't matter, if he seemed happy." I mean - jeez! If that doesn't make you seethe with rage, I don't know what will). Of course, to a reader in 2018, it is clear that Maguire is not only a rapist but a paedophile. Worse, is the clear implication in Emmeline that this is far from the first time he has done this. 

And of course, it is not Maguire's life that is ruined. Sure, his unseen wife seems to sound a bit irked about the whole thing (and who could blame her?), but once Emmeline's pregnancy is revealed to him he pays her to leave and gets back to his life as before. No doubt looking for the next homesick, innocent child to seduce. 

Being an unmarried teenage mother is not even the worst thing that happens to Emmeline, but it is explicit that Maguire's abuse of her is the catalyst for the catalogue of sadness and injustice that fills her long and lonely life. I won't reveal the plot in the second half of Emmeline, but I will say it filled me with an overwhelming anger and sadness. None of what happens to our shero is her own fault. We are told again and again that she is a good, God-fearing young woman, whose only crime is her naivety. But if nobody is willing to educate young girls, that is hardly the fault of the girls themselves: how can they know what it is they do not know? This lack of education certainly doesn't stop her family, friends or neighbours from holding Emmeline responsible. But how can you be responsible for what you do not know you have done?

In the early chapters of Emmeline, I was reminded of the young Jane Eyre and her ousting from the cruel Reed family to life at the barbaric Lowood Institution. The documentary-style depiction of Emmeline's day-to-day life in the Lowell mill and boarding house is reminiscent of Jane's loneliness and drudgery at the school. But when Emmeline starts to fall under Maguire's spell, the tone becomes more reminiscent of work from Tracy Chevalier, who has mastered the art of writing compulsively readable contemporary historical fiction - and that's certainly what Rossner has written here. Emmeline is impossible to put down. The story fires ahead at a fast pace and the pain and perplexity Emmeline feels at the way she is mistreated and cast aside is fierce. The reader demands to know what happens next and is incapable of putting the book down!

What's even more staggering is that Rossner based her novel on the real life story of Emeline Bachelder Gurney and that is possibly the most anger-inducing element of this whole episode. That this was actually allowed to happen to a young child. Of course, there is more than just the patriarchal society to blame for Emmeline/Emeline's tragedy - we could also blame her family and her religion, who both compelled her to think kindly of others and to act to please others. The afterword by Lucy Ellmann in this new Persephone edition offers a thought-provoking and furious way to consider what you have just read.

'Hearts and Minds: The Untold Story of the Great Pilgrimage'

Those with an interest in the suffrage movement are being spoilt for choice with new books to read at the moment, but one I have enjoyed enormously is Hearts and Minds: The Untold Story of the Great Pilgrimage and How Women Won the Vote by historian Jane Robinson. Not least because, look! What a beautiful cover it has!

Hearts and Minds is a refreshing read because it takes as its focus not the Pankhursts and the militant suffragettes of the Women's Social and Political Union, but instead the law-abiding suffragists who campaigned peacefully for the vote for half a century or more. Since the 1860s, the suffragists lobbied and marched and petitioned for women to have the vote, never breaking the law or harming anybody in the process. Frustrated by the lack of movement, the Pankhurst family in 1903 started the Women's Social and Political Union, which ultimately led to a few years of headline grabbing stunts that are sadly what remains etched in most people's minds when they think of 'votes for women'... though this is not the true picture of the movement at all. 

So instead, Jane Robinson uses her wonderful new book to set the record straight and explain why the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (led by the peaceful Millicent Fawcett) were actually the ones who effected change. This culminated in the powerful Great Pilgrimage of 1913, which was made so much harder for the peaceful women who were often misjudged as militants and greeted with hostility and even death threats as a result. 

The Great Pilgrimage saw thousands of women march from all over the UK to congregate in London's Hyde Park for a huge rally, lobbying government for women's suffrage. Jane charts the adventures of the women focussing less on the stories of the big name women who are familiar to us, and more on the lesser known stories found by trawling personal archives, personal diaries and letters and so on, to uncover nuggets of information about their day to day lives during the six-week pilgrimage. I am inclined to agree with Jane that the stories of the everyday women involved in the suffrage movement are often a lot more revealing and interesting than those of the big name campaigners.

It is an utterly fascinating and absorbing read, illustrated by a wide range of photos that I had not previously seen and found very interesting indeed. This is a beautifully written and presented book, and is absolutely essential for anyone with even a passing interest in this fascinating period of women's history. 

My new book!

Tomorrow (February 26) sees the publication of my new book The Women Who Built Bristol (Tangent Books), which is a fundraising project for the charity Bristol Women's Voice. I'm really chuffed with the finished book - it was so much hard work but now having the actual book back makes it so worthwhile.

Containing 250 inspiring women, three sheroic dogs and one heartbroken barmaid from Easton. The Women Who Built Bristol is a bursting compendium of brilliant women who helped to shape Bristol into the vibrant city it is today. From pin makers to police chiefs, from workhouse inmates to lord mayors, this book shows that Bristol was built by women. Also contains 30 brand new illustrations. 

“Jane Duffus and fellow contributors of The Women Who Built Bristol introduce us to a glorious and eclectic set of women who are linked to Bristol. This a wonderful reminder of the texture of women’s lives and their influence in every sphere – something historical accounts often forget. A great initiative from Bristol Women’s Voice, I hope other cities also follow suit.”
Helen Pankhurst; granddaughter of Sylvia and great-granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst

'A Petrol Scented Spring'

A Petrol Scented Spring by Ajay Close

Wow! This book has been sitting on my To Be Read pile for well over a year. Thankfully, something made me finally pick it up to take on a succession of long train journeys at the weekend and I am now a) kicking myself for not having read it sooner and b) praising myself for picking such an absorbing and compelling and wonderful book to accompany me on my travels.

A Petrol Scented Spring by the Scottish author Ajay Close came to my attention via nothing more exotic than my periodic online search for novels about the suffrage movement. But this is far from your bog-standard suffrage novel; this is something quite, quite different.

Set in Perth, Scotland, we are offered a rare glimpse of suffrage life north of the border, which is a welcome change from the majority of novels that are London-centric. As such, the real-life characters who Ajay has used as the basis for many of her characters in the meticulously well-researched A Petrol Scented Spring are not ones I had previously known of, but have now becomes ones I want to know more about.

Centered around the suffocating and almost-mediaeval Perth Prison, we meet the reclusive and repressed prison doctor Hugh Ferguson Watson. A man in his early 40s who has been kissed only once as a teenager and who seems to have scant idea how to relate to actual humans, particularly female humans. Watson’s previous role was as the doctor in a mental asylum, where he learnt how to force feed patients who were not of sound mind. Now, he has been enlisted to the prison services to deal with hunger striking suffragettes and begin the barbaric process of force feeding these political prisoners.

Watson becomes obsessed with one suffragette in particular, Arabella Scott - a woman who his ‘love’ obliges him to torture in the most bizarre and disgusting means possible in order (in his mind) to keep her pure for himself. Arabella is a strong-willed woman with a sharp intellect, steadfast composure and unerring stubborness to endure multiple force feedings every single day… during the entire nine months of her incarceration. As if this brutal twice-daily assault was not enough (we read graphically about how Arabella regurgitates the egg mixture forced into her stomach by a greased tube, and how it comes out stained pink with blood and gritty with bits of broken teeth), Watson keeps Arabella in solitary confinement from the other prisoners, but with at least one wardress to sit in her cell and prevent her leaving her bed, sitting up or even turning to lie on her side - causing the most unimaginable pain in the prisoner’s motionless body. Yet somehow, Watson believes he is doing this because he loves Arabella and wants to keep her pure.

Ajay Close does a wonderful job or bringing the stinking, wretched prison to life in the reader’s head. She conjures up cold walls dripping with damp, fetid and stinking rooms with windows that do not open, and the horrors of the screams from other cells that echo down the corridors. We read graphically of prisoners who are force fed via the anus. We read graphically of prisoners who are left close to death thanks to Watson’s abusive treatment of them. And we read graphically of prisoners whose most intimate body parts are exposed and ogled by Watson’s lecherous assistant, Dr Lindsay, who leaves the suffragettes terrified that he will rape them.

And then we meet the naive Donella; a well-brought up young lady who is staying in Perth with relatives to recuperate after an illness. By chance she meets Dr Watson, falls in love and the two quickly marry, despite the heavy suspicion of her sister Hilda. There’s something about Donella that appeals to the sexless Dr Watson: she looks identical to Arabella. But of course, she is not Arabella… and there the novel takes an even more cruel and horrible turn.

Honestly, A Petrol Scented Spring is the most gripping and compelling novel I’ve read for months. It quite genuinely is a page-turner. I usually find it very hard to read books on trains as all the noises and people and announcements distract me, but A Petrol Scented Spring managed to completely catch my attention and draw me in to its dark, stinking and brutal world. I even had to stay up reading it into the twilight hours when I got home to ensure I found out how it ended. Hint: you should do the same.

PS - As further proof of my newfound adoration of Ajay Close, please have a read of the ‘About Me’ page on her website. One day I hope to engineer a situation where we go out for drinks together, ‘cos she sounds like she would be a bloody good drinking companion.