historical fiction

The Next Ship Home, by Heather Webb

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Two sisters from Sicily arrive at Ellis Island in 1902 after a nightmare ocean journey. Fleeing their abusive father, they hope to build a new life together in the U.S. However, Francesca worries that her beloved sister Maria will not pass the health exam; she has become ill in the crowded and unsanitary third-class compartment where they were confined. They might both be sent back to Sicily on the next ship.

Meanwhile Alma, a second-generation German-American, lives in a tenement in the Lower East Side’s Little Germany where her stepfather owns and runs a bierhaus in the basement. He thinks Alma is worthless and mocks her interest in learning languages spoken by their Irish and Italian neighbors. Deciding her unpaid labor in the bierhaus and home is not enough, he forces her to take a job at Ellis Island processing new arrivals telling her she must give her pay to him to help support the household.

Although Alma starts her new job filled with the prejudice against immigrants she’s learned at home, her compassion is stirred by the fear and suffering she encounters, and she gradually learns that these are just people like herself. Becoming especially close to Francesca and Maria, Alma works hard at her language skills so she can help by translating for those who don’t speak English. She also tries to find ways around the roadblocks put in place by the bureaucracy and some corrupt officials.

At first Alma doesn’t believe the whispered stories of extortion and abuse at Ellis Island—carefully researched by the author and based on real events—but Francesca has first-hand knowledge of them. The courage of two women and the growing friendship between them are inspiring.

Unlike some historical fiction that glosses over the practical details of everyday life, the author gives us a full picture of these women’s lives. I love that Webb has chosen to portray this neglected but important part of history: the corruption at Ellis Island, the mutual support of the downtrodden, and the dreams that women fight for despite the forces arrayed against them.

The story also follows Francesca after she leaves Ellis Island, providing unusual insight into this critical phase, including the hoops that new immigrants—especially women—must jump through and the traps they must avoid. I’m learning so much these days about the immigration process as I follow the news, so I appreciate the author’s depiction of the inner lives of both Francesca and Alma.

As we confront and protest against the atrocities visited upon legal immigrants in this country by a rogue regime, I found both comfort and inspiration in this story. Corruption and the abuse of immigrants have a long history in the U.S. and Webb’s portrait of the Ellis Island bureaucracy shows the range of workers, from those who actively abuse arriving immigrants to those who look the other way to those who try to help the new arrivals as best they can. At the same time, Webb shows what seemingly powerless people can accomplish by working together.

Can you recommend a fiction or nonfiction book about the history of Ellis Island?

Glorious Exploits, by Ferdia Lennon

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Syracuse, 412 BCE: The Athenians’ invasion has surprisingly been defeated and the surviving invaders stuck in an old quarry where they are dying in droves from malnutrition and ill-treatment. According to Plutarch, some of their captors so loved the plays of Euripides that they offered prisoners food in exchange for lines of verse.

Lennon, with degrees in History, Classics and writing, takes this morsel of history and creates something both fantastic and deeply human. Two out-of-work potters—Gelon who loves Euripides’ plays and Lampo who loves wine and fun times—make their way into the quarry armed with olives, bread and wine in search of verse. Eventually they decide to put on a fully staged performance of two plays by Euripides: Medea and The Trojan Women.

Lampo narrates the story in full-blown Irish vernacular, which is a little startling at first. He’s illiterate and doesn’t share his friend Gelon’s devotion to Athenian tragedy, but why not go along with it? He has nothing else to do. “Gelon says that’s what the best plays do. If they’re true enough you’ll recognize it even if it all seems mad at first, and this is why we give a shit about Troy, though for all we know, it was just some dream of Homer’s.”

It does all seem mad. But Lampo’s voice is irresistible. His wisecracks and pranks contribute much of the promised humor. However, as members of my book club said, for a book advertised as a comedy, most of it isn’t funny at all.

At first Lampo gloats about the prisoners’ suffering, saying of the stink in the quarry: “Ah, and I like the way they smell. It’s awful, bult it’s wonderful awful. They smell like victory and more. Every Syracusan feels it when they get that smell. Even the slaves feel it.” Yet, as they proceed with the plays, he cannot ignore the prisoners’ humanity. For me the most interesting aspect of the book is how the characters, especially Lampo, deal with setbacks and successes, finding parts of themselves they never knew existed and looking at others in ways they never thought possible.

I don’t think I’d have read this book if one of my book clubs hadn’t selected it. The premise didn’t seem like something I’d choose, especially in this time of too many stupid wars and inhumane concentration camps. I’m glad I did.

This story surprised me in ways that few novels do these days and moved me even when I didn’t want to be moved. It’s oddly light-hearted despite the grim circumstances. It seems to me to be a buddy caper like Butch and Sundance with a bit of Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland hey-let’s-put-on-a-show’s energy. Lennon doesn’t press his themes hard but leaves us to take what we will from this remarkable story.

What novel have you read that surprised you?

North Woods, by Daniel Mason

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Daniel Mason’s fifth novel is a shimmering tale of a patch of New England woods and those who pass through it over four centuries. We feel the flow of history as we navigate what is essentially a set of twelve stories keyed to the seasons. They are linked and validated by documents, such as song lyrics, pictures, and almanacs.

Mason brings each story to life with sensitive comprehension of both the people and their place. We begin with a pair of young lovers running away from their Puritan colony.

They had come to the spot in the freshness of June, chased from the village by its people, threading deer path through the forest, the valleys, the fern groves, and the quaking bogs . . . Gone was England, gone the Colony.

What fascinates me is the way Mason writes each section using style, language and social constructs appropriate to its time period. For example, there’s a former British soldier planting an apple orchard during the time of John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, and a spiritualist during the time of the Third Great Awakening. There are murder ballads in the 19th century and psychiatric case notes during the early years of using lobotomies to solve neurological disfunction. What a challenge to set yourself as a writer!

The descriptions of the natural world are stunning as well. Mason has done his research and writes beautifully of the woods and the creatures—and insects—within it. One of his sources, whose wisdom I see throughout the book, is Tom Wessels, whose fabulous book Reading the Forested Landscape was given to me by my son.

I propose a new calendar: not one autumn but twelve, a hundred. The autumn when the birches are yellow but still have their leaves; when the beeches are green but the birch leaves have fallen; when the oaks tint to the color of ripe apricots and the beeches yellow; when the oaks turn a cigar brown and the beeches curl up into crispy copper rolls. And so on: I’ve missed a few. But to call it all just “autumn”!

 As in Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Visitation, which is centered on a plot of land in Brandenburg and the houses built there, we see a yellow house built, damaged, added to, redecorated, and reconstructed while different inhabitants move through it. As Clara MacGauffin wrote in “The Unhomely House,” there is a peculiar tension when it is the home that is unsafe. “The disturbance is not simply fear. It is closer to a conflict in perception where what should reassure instead unsettles.”

My book club jumped at the chance to read this book; we’re fans of Daniel Mason’s novels such as A Winter Soldier and A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth. However, some thought this book depressing—in the course of four hundred years, every story ends; everyone dies—while others found a lot of it hilarious. There are ghosts here; former inhabitants who sometimes make themselves known, reminding me of Gabrielle Mullarkey’s novel The Ones Who Never Left which she wrote because she wondered if the people who used to live in our houses ever truly leave, an unsettling thought indeed.

Amused by the writerly games and deeply appreciative of the landscape and its history, I did get to a point when I thought the book might be a bit too much. I was overwhelmed by grief at the loss of the birds and the forests, the elm trees and chestnuts.

Then I was reminded of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower thanks to Mason’s story of a post-doctoral fellow studying spring ephemerals, those lovely flowers I’ve tracked in that sliver of time between the coming of the spring sunlight and the canopy blocking it out. “Sometimes, overwhelmed, she retreats into the forests of the past . . . and she has found that the only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.”

Cold comfort, but I’ll take it.

Have you read a book that has comforted you during this dark time in our history and/or has you thinking about what we leave behind during our brief passage on this earth?

 

The Frozen River, by Ariel Lawhon

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The blizzards that have been pummeling New England recently might hold us up for a while until the plows come through. They might send us scrambling for generators and firewood while waiting for the power to be restored, or putting on snowshoes to go out and assess the damage from fallen trees.

But what if we were in Maine in 1789 when the Kennebec River freezes and stalls activity in our small community? What if the river freezes early and traps a man’s body? Midwife Martha Ballard learns that two men fell through the ice that dark night: Sam Dawin who escaped and Joshua Burgess who didn’t. 

Called to examine the body Martha determines that Burgess was beaten and hanged before being thrown into the river. She’s interrupted by Dr. Page, a recent Harvard graduate and newcomer to town, who calls her an amateur and declares the death an accidental drowning. She later learns that her son Cyrus fought with Burgess shortly before the man’s death. Burgess and Judge North have been accused of raping a local woman, one of many secrets swirling in the village.

We follow Martha’s investigation through her activities as well as through the journal she keeps to record her work as a midwife and community events. Her story is “inspired” by the real Martha Ballard who lived in Hallowell, Maine, delivered over 800 babies, and left a diary covering 30 years of her life. While the author draws on the diary, a nonfiction biography of Ballard, and court transcripts, this story is firmly categorised as historical fiction.

I liked the use of the journal. Even when fictionalised, documents add veracity to a story. Although they sometimes repeated events already dramatised, these sections brought home the physical labor of using ink and quill. I also liked the use of a flashback at the end of each section to fill in information about Martha and her beloved husband Ephraim. These brief forays into the past come just when the information is needed.

The overriding image of the river is powerful; everyone depends on it and is controlled by it. The patriarchal limits on women are powerful as well. Martha’s work makes her an anomaly at a time when women had almost no power and rarely worked in a profession. A woman could not testify in court without her husband accompanying her. Midwives were being supplanted by male doctors who often lacked rudimentary knowledge of sanitation and dismissed women with complaints as lazy or crazy.

Being already well aware of these conditions for women in the 18th century, I found their frequent and unsubtle deployment made the story drag, as did the pace of events now and then. At the same time, I recognise that the slower pace is appropriate to life at the time, when it might take days or weeks to travel between towns, and that there are many readers who might not know about the limitations women suffered then. Similarly, the bullies and corrupt locals seemed exaggerated until I looked around at what is going on here today.

Without giving the ending away, I will say that I appreciated the story’s unusual path to resolution. I also appreciated how the Martha of this story adapts her strategies as needed during the investigation, sometimes backing down, sometimes attacking, sometimes negotiating.

The story also made me think about the body. Not just the dead man, the necessary start to a murder mystery, but also how we inhabit our bodies, whether it’s pushing a quill pen across rough paper or delivering a baby into the world, making love with a husband of 35 years or trying to move quickly through deep snow, riding a horse or dealing with the effects of rape.

Things have changed in the centuries since this story takes place, but not human nature, its insecurity and greedy grasp for power on the one hand and its generous care for everyone in the community on the other. And no matter how much we may think we’ve controlled the natural world since then, it only takes a blizzard to remind us how wrong we are.

What is frozen in your life? What will it take to unfreeze it?

The Wonder, by Emma Donoghue

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Like some of Donoghue’s other novels, such as Room and Haven,  this story again follows people confined in a tiny location. In 1850s Ireland Elizabeth (Lib) Wright, an English nurse, is sent to a rural area to stay with an 11-year-old girl who supposedly can survive without food. Anna and her parents say she has not eaten anything for four months, only water and—Anna says—manna from heaven.

A committee made up of villagers, including the doctor and priest, want to prove that the girl is truly not eating anything. Their motives are mixed, as we learn, but they are deeply influenced by the Catholic church and its stories of saints and miracles. To show their earnest motives, they hire both Lib Wright, who’s been trained in scientific nursing principles by Florence Nightingale, and a nun to take turns keeping watch over Anna.

Donoghue is too good a writer to let the women be flat symbols of science and religion. They are far more complex than that, and both waver into the liminal area between them. The story is told from Lib’s point of view, and she rails about the malign influence of the Catholic church and the way superstition and ambition play on the members of the committee.

Most of the story takes place in Anna’s small bedroom in the rough, rustic cottage where Lib requires the girl be isolated to ensure no one is slipping food to her. Even the parents must keep their distance except for a morning and evening greeting from her mother. Lib often clashes with the mother, such as insisting that pilgrims no longer crowd the cottage to see The Wonder and beg for her to bless them—before leaving a monetary offering of course.

Catholic doctrine and rituals guide the family’s days and nights. Anna prays constantly; her only books are religious texts. Lib herself is a sceptic and not religious at all. A veteran of the Crimean war and a short-lived marriage, she is determined to unmask the fraud quickly, so she can return to her hospital in England. Yet Anna, so smart and so sincere, begins to affect her during the long eight-hour shifts, just the two of them in the tiny room.

Among the other themes percolating through the story are ideas about food—it has not been that long since the potato famine in Ireland—and grief and the effects of isolation. I treasured the tiny hints of family, such as the destitute young cousin the family has taken in, and community where neighbors generously come up with scarce items such as extra mattresses and pillows.

Writers often talk about the ‘sagging middle’ where stories begin and end strongly but not much happens in the middle, leading to the reader giving up on the book. I gave up on this book several times. It seemed to drag on without much happening. Lib’s complaints about the Catholic church became repetitious as well, though perhaps that’s my fault, and  I’ve just read one too many books about the very real suffering of the Irish under the rule of a power-hungry church.

One solution to the ‘sagging middle’ is to include a turn in the very middle of the story. Sometimes called the fulcrum, hinge, or mirror moment, something happens that dramatically changes the protagonist and the course of the story. Not giving anything away, there is such a turn here which was interesting. However, I still struggled until the story picked up near the end.

I think what kept me going was my strong interest in that liminal moment in the 19th century when science challenged the church’s teaching. It seems important to revisit that time now when science is once again being thrown out in favor of gossip and superstition. And as a result, children are dying.

What period in the past gives you insight into today’s challenges?

Best Books I Read in 2025

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As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are twelve of the best books I read in 2025. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

Fiction

1. Orbital, by Samantha Harvey
Put six people from five countries into the International Space Station orbiting Earth and leave them there for several years. Now write about a single day, which encompasses sixteen orbits, meaning sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets. I immediately imagined around a dozen different stories that could come out of this premise. I never imagined Samantha Harvey’s Orbital.

2. The Painter of Silence, by Georgina Harding
In 1950s Romania a nurse named Safta recognises a new patient as her childhood companion. They’ve been separated by the war and the years and the changes wrought by Stalinist rule. Deaf and mute, Tinu only communicates through his art. This is the novel I have been waiting for. Hoping for. It is quiet and asks much of the reader as it unfolds.

3. In the Fall, by Jeffrey Lent 
In Virginia during the last days of the Civil War, a wounded Union soldier becomes separated from his comrades and is found near death by an escaped slave who saves him. Norman Pelham and Leah Mebane become inseparable and, after he is demobilised and they marry, the two decide to walk to his home in Randolph, Vermont. This story of three generations of Pelhams made me forget everything else in order to finish it.

4. The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson
The twenty-two chapters that make up this brief novel combine surprisingly poignant discussions between two women, one very young and one very old, with closely observed details of the natural world  on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland. The chapters are deceptively plain yet leave the reader aware that each seemingly normal summer adventure holds a deeper meaning. Jansson’s simple and direct language leaves a silence similar to the white space around a line of poetry, space where a reader can bring forward her own memories.

5. Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf
Reading this classic novel now, more than fifty years since I first encountered it as an undergrad, is quite a different experience. Back then I was confused and thrilled by Woolf’s modernist, experimental style that expanded forever my idea of what a novel could be. Now I see it as a story of midlife, in several senses of the word.

6. Middlemarch, by George Eliot
What stood out to me on rereading this classic is the theme of what it means to live a good life. By that I mean a life of integrity, one we can be satisfied with when we lie on our deathbeds. In Middlemarch we have all these lives, all of these people intending to do the right thing yet derailed by temptations and compromises and the pressures of daily life. As we follow each storyline, we get to see various permutations of what a good life might look like—or not.

7. Birds of Paradise, by Paul Scott.
A reread of one of my favorite books, I found this story of William Conway looking back and trying to make sense of his life as good as I remembered. Conway revisits people and memories from his childhood in India during the Raj, his English education, and his suffering in a Japanese prison camp during WWII. So much is obscured in our lives, so much we don’t understand at the time.

8. Brother of the More Famous Jack, by Barbara Trapido
I looked for some light reads this year and this one really tickled me.

Nonfiction

1. A Woman in the Polar Night, by Christiane Ritter
In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria to join her husband Hermann for a year in Spitsbergen, an island in the Svalbard archipelago, which lies between mainland Norway and the North Pole. Ritter’s journal summons the experience of surviving such a punishing climate and its surprising rewards.

2. Spell Freedom: The Underground Schools That Built the Civil Rights Movement, by Elaine Weiss
This well-researched and engaging book tells the story of some of the less well-known leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, courageous people who came before the famous speeches and laid the foundations for the Movement’s success by creating the citizen schools that prepared Black Americans in the Jim Crow South to register to vote.

3. Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country, by Edward Parnell 
A fusion of travelogue, literary review, and memoir that reminded me of (and mentions) W. G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, it sent me off to read many of the books I didn’t already know. And I discovered a story that sent me to the heart of something that has haunted me for a while.

4. The Lost Words, by Robert MacFarlane and Jackie Morris
When the Oxford Junior Dictionary was updated, it was found that around forty common words had been dropped—all of them words to do with nature. In response, MacFarlane and Morris came together to create what they call a spell book to help young readers rediscover the natural world, believing that unless we experience and learn to love the world of nature around us, we will not work to save it. This is the most beautiful book I’ve seen in a long, long while.

What are the best books you read in 2025?

In the Fall, by Jeffrey Lent

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In Virginia during the last days of the Civil War, a wounded Union soldier becomes separated from his comrades and is found near death by an escaped slave who saves him. Norman Pelham and Leah Mebane become inseparable and, after he is demobilised and they marry, the two decide to walk to his home in Randolph, Vermont. As they pass through nearby Bethel, his fellow veterans—already home for several months—watch for him.

So they saw him pass along the road that Indian-summer morning with the sugarbush maples flaring on the hillsides and the hilltop sheep pastures overgrown with young cherry and maple. Word ran along the road ahead of him so near all his neighbors and townspeople saw him walking in the long easy stride of one who counted walking in months and years not miles, a rucksack cut from an issue blanket strapped to his back and by his side a girl near his own height in a sunfaded blue dress and carrying her own cardboard suitcase bound with rough twine.

Norman’s father has died while he was fighting, leaving the farm to him. His mother and two sisters, while abolitionists, are so shocked and troubled by Leah that they move into town, leaving the young couple to begin their new lives on the farm. Fired by their fierce love for each other, they ignore the scorn of their neighbors by keeping to themselves and plunging into the hard work of making a living from a hill farm.

Thus begins this saga of three generations of Pelhams, haunted by their troubled legacy of what Leah left behind and by America’s ongoing racial tensions.

This debut novel was a huge bestseller when it was released in 2000. I told the friend who recommended it to me that I didn’t know whether to bless her or curse her because I found it thoroughly addictive reading—the prose so luscious that I read slowly to savor it and could hardly bear to set it aside until I’d finished all 565 pages.

Lent takes his time with the story, enclosing me in the worlds of nineteenth-century farm life and early twentieth-century bootlegging, in New England’s mountains and North Carolina’s tobacco and cotton fields. I especially enjoyed the very specific details about tools and descriptions of places and processes in these time periods; they added so much richness to the fabric of the story. I could tell how fully the author inhabited each moment of the story as he wrote.

The partridge went up, a sudden burst of speckled animation that hit a long going-away glide down the mountain and he passed the splendid moment where his mind left him and was all out ahead of him, pinned down only on the flying bird as the gun came up. Then there was a pinwheel of feathers and both dogs broke past him and he was back.

A few things surprised me. For example, some significant events are skipped over in a sentence or two while others that seem lightweight unfold with great leisure. A possible reason could be that this is a story about men, so the female characters’ stories—aside from aspects that influence the men’s stories—are just not that important. Or maybe the reason is that we are in the men’s point of view and they simply don’t understand the women’s experiences. Maybe it’s something else altogether.

Much as I eventually loved the book, I almost stopped after the first couple of pages. Why? Because I don’t like when a chunk of text from later in the book is stuck in front as a prologue. It feels like an attempt to motivate the reader to plow through hundreds of pages until we finally meet these people and find out who they are, instead of just trusting the story. I’m not opposed to all prologues; some are great. But this book doesn’t need a prologue; Chapter One begins with a splendid hook. Once I got there, I was caught by the prose and the lovely grounding in time and place and character and theme.

I truly did not want this book to end. I keep opening it up in random places and looking closely at a single paragraph, trying to see how Lent works his magic. I read it aloud. Sometimes I copy it, writing in longhand, to get the feel of the sentences in my fingers. It really is beautifully done. I’m eager to read some of his later books.

Have you read a novel where it felt like falling into a dream from which you never want to wake up?

The Women, by Kristin Hannah

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Frankie McGrath, a naïve 23-year-old “California girl” and nursing student, enlists in the Army Nurse Corps because it is the branch of the military that will send her to Vietnam as quickly as possible. It’s 1965, and she has an idealistic vision of meeting up with her brother who is deployed there.

Unsurprisingly, once there she’s overwhelmed by the difference between her dreams and reality. The author recreates the day-to-day chaos and destruction of a medical station during the Vietnam war through Frankie’s eyes and emotions. Frankie manages to adjust and become a superb surgical nurse, very much thanks to Barb and Ethel, two fellow nurses who befriend and support her. Friendship, loyalty and betrayal are themes that run through the book.

At the end of her second tour in 1969, Frankie returns to California, and the second half of the book is about the antipathy she encounters. Confronted by antagonism that ranges from pretending she (as a woman) could not have been in Vietnam to outright hatred and abuse, she struggles to find her feet. As her mental health deteriorates she calls constantly on Barb and Ethel who repeatedly drop their East Coast lives to fly to California to help her.

All the conflict in this part of the book comes from the supposed hatred of Vietnam vets. True, there are romantic and work problems, but it is her emotional and mental fragility in the face of this hatred that makes her unable to deal with these normal problems.

I do not question the PTSD suffered by returning Vietnam veterans of all genders and, indeed, all of our veterans deployed in war. However, I was active in the antiwar movement at the time, and I NEVER saw protestors spitting on returning veterans and calling them baby killers, not in person, not on tv. Just the opposite. We were on the side of the soldiers, working to help them come home safe from a senseless war—something most of the soldiers in country wanted as well.

So I have long believed that all that supposed fury of protestors against veterans is a story—a lie—created by the warmongers to discredit the antiwar movement. It’s an urban legend. Here’s what Snopes has to say.

The claim that anti-war protesters spit on Vietnam veterans returning from the war is a persistent one, but there is no clear evidence that this was a widespread occurrence . . .

The persistence of this claim, despite lack of clear contemporary evidence, suggests it may be more of an urban legend that gained traction over time rather than a documented widespread occurrence. However, the available Snopes archives do not contain a comprehensive fact-check specifically addressing the broader claim about anti-war protesters spitting on Vietnam veterans.

Without more specific archival information addressing this claim directly, it’s difficult to make a definitive statement about its veracity. The persistence of the story, even among those who did not serve in Vietnam, indicates how deeply ingrained this narrative has become in discussions about the reception of Vietnam veterans upon their return home.

Other resources are a scholarly book by Jerry Lembke: The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam and a Wikipedia page, neither of which find any credible proof to support the myth.

These days, we know a lot more about deliberate misinformation—lies—told for political purposes. I’m disappointed that Hannah, a brilliant writer whose other books I’ve enjoyed, has chosen to repeat and amplify this distortion of what actually happened back then.

The first part of the book which takes place in Vietnam, although a bit melodramatic, provides a vivid picture of what life must have been like on the ground for nurses. I applaud her choice to concentrate the second half of the book on how hard life is for returning war veterans. I’m just sorry she stuck to this simplistic—and false—narrative of abuse of Vietnam vets instead of digging into the more nuanced reasons why we see so many vets struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts.

Have you read anything about women in the Vietnam War?

Middlemarch, by George Eliot

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I’ve been rereading Eliot’s classic novel this month with Haley Larsen’s Closely Reading group on Substack. It’s been a few decades since I last read it, and different features of the book leaped out at me this time.

The story is about the inhabitants of the fictional town of Middlemarch in the English Midlands around 1830. Eliot does a masterful job of zooming in to a dozen or so characters while giving other townspeople plenty to space to make themselves known.

We first meet Dorothea Brooke, a wealthy and intelligent young (19) woman, who wants to do great things in service to others, starting with better housing for the tenants of her uncle and guardian Arthur Brooke, a hilariously foolish man who can talk himself out of any opinion. Dorothea is extremely religious and denies herself pleasures, such as her mother’s jewelry, in order to sacrifice herself to a greater cause.

That turns out to be marrying Rev. Edward Casaubon, prematurely elderly at 45. A dry stick of a man, who has devoted his life to creating The Key to All Mythologies, he marries her but quickly withdraws into his shell. He rejects her romantic ideas of assisting him in his work, like Milton’s daughters taking down the blind poet’s dictation (as Dorothea dreams), mostly because he fears she will mock him when she sees how little he’s accomplished.  

We also meet Dr. Tertius Lydgate who hopes to modernise medicine In Middlemarch and the lovely, self-centered Rosamond Vincy who sets out to capture him. Her brother Fred loves Mary Garth, nurse to his uncle Mr. Featherstone, and she him. But she won’t marry Fred because he is feckless and a spendthrift, believing himself to be Featherstone’s heir and borrowing on the strength of that.

Mary’s parents Caleb and Susan Garth are kind and generous folks, Caleb being land agent for Featherstone. Then there’s Mr. Bulstrode, a wealthy banker. He’s a pious if hypocritical Methodist who runs much of the town and would like to do more to impose his beliefs on other residents.

A lot of characters—and there are more! However, Eliot wrangles their stories into a coherent story where we touch each person often enough that it’s not hard to keep them straight.

What stood out to me on this reading is the theme of what it means to live a good life. By that I mean a life of integrity, one we can be satisfied with when we lie on our deathbeds. In Middlemarch we have all these lives, all of these people intending to do the right thing yet derailed by temptations and compromises and the pressures of daily life. As we follow each storyline, we get to see various permutations of what a good life might look like—or not.

One aspect of a good life is being a contributing member of society, one which among other things means getting involved in politics. We hear a good bit about the Reform Bill (later the Reform Act of 1832) expanding the franchise to a larger segment of the male population, and about the coming of the railroads that threatens local farmers. There’s an interesting parallel here between the politics of the period and Eliot’s method of concentrating on a few privileged characters while including others to a lesser extent but with equal respect.

Another aspect is our personal relationships. I am fascinated by Eliot’s idea of a “home epic” which is what she calls this novel. She defines a home epic as a story about what happens after the wedding, particularly during the course of a marriage. I am often frustrated by stories that end with a wedding, as though that’s the be-all and end-all of a woman’s life, so I love that she takes marriage as  the starting point instead. I’d expand the definition of Eliot’s term to include domestic stories, stories within a family, not just the married couple. And by family, I mean families of choice too. A home epic might also cover the course of a life and how we interact with others, how we live within communities.

The greatest barrier to a good relationship, whether with a spouse or a neighbour, is embodied in her subtitle “A Study of Provincial Life.” Yes, the town is geographically provincial, but there is a larger meaning to the word. As Rebecca Mead puts it in My Life in Middlemarch, “It is also concerned with the emotional repercussions of a kind of immature provincialism of the soul—a small-minded, self-centered perspective that resists the implications of a larger view.”

Over and over again, we see characters misunderstanding each other. So many conversations where people misread each other’s intentions or fail to comprehend what the other is thinking! We know this because of Eliot’s psychological insights, and her technique of using a narrator to go into each character’s thoughts. Her narrator also pulls out to give us that larger view, sometimes warning us that a character may not be as bad as they appear. The narrator can occasionally seem intrusive but is vital to Eliot’s ability to weave the story together and bring out her theme.

Therefore, to live a good life we must be able to empathise with others. We have to work to actually see things the way someone else does, to set aside our own view of the world and understand theirs. I think this is why our narrator persists in explaining these characters to us. Eliot keeps coming back to the idea that we have to grow out of our natural self-centeredness and recognise that others see the world differently.

It’s not easy. As Eliot says, “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

Yet we can try.

What does it mean to you to live a good life?

The Child from the Sea, by Elizabeth Goudge

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Little is known of Lucy Walter whose son James was the oldest child of King Charles II. From those few facts, Goudge has spun an entrancing story of a vibrant girl whose great love for the prince—whose father ruled England, Scotland and Ireland as King Charles I—lasted a lifetime. We first meet Lucy as a child in Wales, where she lived with her family in Roch Castle and thought herself part buccaneer, roaming the countryside experiencing all of creation with a dazzling joy.

It was then she became aware of the birds. They were coming down from the sky like drifting autumn leaves, martins, chaffinches, goldfinches and linnets, finding their way to the bracken-sheltered hollows and the warm dry hedges and the safe crannies of the rocks. Lucy had watched the bird migrations before but she had never seen one halted like this, halted as the warning sounded along the shore.

She stood still, scarcely breathing, her arms out and her face turned up to the darkening sky, and they had no fear of her. A wing brushed her cheek and just for a moment some tired little being alighted on her hand, putting on one finger for ever the memory of a tiny claw that clung like a wedding ring. It was for her a moment of ecstasy, of marriage with all living creatures, of unity with life itself, and she whispered in Welsh, ‘Dear God, this happiness is too great for me!’

In London she glimpses the young prince from a bridge over the Thames, and they seem to have even in that brief moment a special connection, one that grows naturally over the years as they encounter each other, until they finally discover the wonder of first love. Though lost in their mutual fervor, Lucy insists on marriage first which, in this historical fiction, was performed by her beloved local parson before the marriage was consummated. It had to be kept secret because the political situation had become fraught.

However, this book is so much more than a love story. Charles’s father, Charles I, was under attack for his belief in the divine right of kings. He argued with Parliament by illegally levying taxes without their consent and alienated others during this time of religious disputes by marrying a Catholic and trying to enforce high-church Anglican practices. Charles I was successor to his father James I both of whom I encountered recently in Phillipa Gregory’s Earthly Joys.

The reader stays with Lucy as she tries to navigate these tumultuous times of civil unrest and debates over the power of the king and Parliament while staying true to her own Prince Charles. As we move between revolution and exile and betrayals, Lucy’s story illuminates themes of forgiveness, loyalty and enduring love. Given our own fraught times, her story is a welcome reminder of these virtues. They may not protect us from harm, but we can stay true to ourselves.

This final book from the beloved author of adult and children’s books abounds in such hard-won wisdom. I read it when it first came out in 1970 and at the time was absorbed in the romance of these two young people and of the Stuart kings about whom I’d read so much.

On this reading, though, I was looking for and found insight from Goudge, who was 70 at the time and had lived through both World Wars and the great changes and horrors of the Twentieth Century, as recounted in her memoir The Joy of the Snow. For example, the description of Elenor Gwinne, Lucy’s grandmother, the peace she had attained and how, struck me as a genuine example of wisdom one might come to in the course of a long life.

The other advantage of this late-in-life novel is that Goudge is writing in the fullness of her powers, as shown in the richness of the story, the interweaving of fact and fiction into a story that keeps the reader enchanted from first page to the last. We move from place to place but each one comes to life because we encounter them through Lucy’s eyes.

I was especially taken by the way Goudge uses description to evoke a response, everything from the smallest image to passages that capture your heart. A particularly thoughtful image is spoken by one of Charles’s friends: “ ‘ . . . loyalty is one of the most difficult of virtues, a flower with all its petals pointing in different directions.’ ” And a passage that thrilled me is:

The birds sang for joy of the growing light, and when Lucy opened her window to hear them, the air smelt of violets, though as yet she had found none under the dead leaves in the unicorn wood. But she found minute buttons of coral buds on the brambles and the green of dog’s mercury among the leaves, and when she left the wood and looked back from the far end of the field, she saw how the trees in the silvery sunshine were clothing themselves in pale amethyst and paler coral, in faint crimson and dun gold, one colour fading into the other as the colours do on the iridescent breast of a bird. 

Lucy never loses her thrilling response to the world, whether it’s a sailing vessel or a homely fire. She is no saint but is constantly reminded—and reminds us—that there are good people in the world and that even in the midst of danger we can keep a loving heart.

What historical fiction or nonfiction have you read that gives you courage in our dark times?