Learned by Heart, by Emma Donoghue
After slogging through Ramses: Son of Light, it was such a relief to immerse myself in historical fiction as it should be written: absolutely absorbing, transporting me to another time and place through the eyes of characters who feel real even as I recognize how different their world and their assumptions about it are from mine.
In this case, the characters don’t just feel real, they are real, or at least are based on real people. Eliza Raine, the teenaged protagonists of this story, was the first lover of the famous Anne Lister (of “Gentleman Jack” fame if you know her from TV), whose copious diaries and letters left posterity with plenty of information about her openly lesbian lifestyle in early 19th century England. Eliza is also a girl of mixed race, one of the many children of liaisons formed in India between Englishmen working for the East India Company, and the Indian women who were not legally wives under English law.
Sent to England with a guardian at age seven, Eliza has always been a bit of an outsider, but she’s found a place for herself at the boarding school where we find her when she’s fourteen. Her life is not thrilling, but it’s not one of grinding hardship either; she has friends, is relatively good at her schoolwork, and is in the process of carving out a small and limited place for herself in a country where her skin colour will always distinguish her as someone not fully English. Then Anne Lister arrives as Eliza’s new classmate and roommate, and everything changes.
The headlong passion of teenage love is brilliantly depicted here, as is the whole world these girls live in. The only thing I would change about this novel is the one thing an honest author of historical fiction couldn’t change, and that is Eliza’s fate. She is such a strong, vivid, brilliant character — caught up in the charm of the far more strong-willed Anne, yet with her own independent spirit — that I wanted more for her than history allows. Knowledge of the real Eliza’s fate (which we get in flash-forward scenes set ten years after Eliza’s romance with Anne) makes this book bittersweet, but it was a wonderfully immersive experience in the characters and their world.
