Review: Joan of Domremy by Kennith Maitland

Joan of Domrémy by Kennith Maitland is a novella snapshot of Joan of Arc’s life when she seeks an audience with the Dauphin to save the French city of Orléans from the English. In Joan’s efforts to speak with the Dauphin about her visions to save France, she encounters a gardener, a starving English soldier, an armorer, and a nobleman who will host at his home the marriage between the Dauphin’s lover and an English noble. The reader soon finds, however, that reality seems slightly askew. The characters appear not as they seem. Time seems to both shift and standstill, each encounter seeming to occur concurrently. This shifting sense of reality made it challenging to find, and hold onto, an anchor in this story.

Of course Joan comes up against sexist and misogynist views of the day, which is not necessarily a surprise, but Joan’s reactions to them either didn’t sit totally right with me, or I did not understand her motivations for some of her dialogue. Perhaps this novella went over my head in terms of it being a more psychological, philosophical talking-heads only type of vignette, seeming to exist in a vacuum, rather than an emotionally evocative historical snapshot of one of Joan’s many trials. Due to these reasons, I ultimately did not connect with this novella as I had hoped.