Marina Maxwell
  • Home
  • MMMusings
  • Blogs
  • About Me
  • My Books
  • Book Reviews
  • FAMILY TALES

Reviews

Categories

All


I read and review both historical fiction and non-fiction, but also enjoy biographies, crime and some contemporary fiction.
​ 

Please note that unless stated that I have received these books directly from the publisher or author in exchange for an honest review, I either purchase my own copies or source them from my local library service. 

​Links to Amazon, Book Depository or Dymocks Australia are only for the reader's reference.
(Due to some poor experiences recently with Booktopia, from 2023 I will no longer link to them.)

My reviews for Historical Novels Review, the magazine of the Historical Novel Society, can be found online here
​

Mrs England

16/6/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
 
In 1904 Ruby May is a children’s nurse (we learn it is an occupation that should never be confused with the lesser  “nursemaid”) and is employed by the prestigious Norland Institute in London. After being unable to travel with her present family to America, she is reassigned to Hardcastle House in the wilds of Yorkshire to look after the four children of mill-owner, Charles England.
 
His wife, Lilian, the Mrs England of the title, is distant, detached and forgetful. She spends most of her time in her rooms, takes a lot of baths and shows scant interest in her children or the staff. There is no housekeeper and it is her husband who makes the decisions about the running of the household which Ruby finds most unusual, including his insistence that the children be locked into the nursery at night.
 
Ruby is puzzled by Mrs England’s odd behaviour and through her growing affectionate relationship with the children, her friendship with the tutor and other individuals such as the blacksmith Sheldrake, Ruby slowly peels back the layers of the truth. The narrative is interspersed with flashbacks in Ruby’s own life which also gradually reveal her own secrets.
 
Apart from having the main character a nurse rather than the ubiquitous governess, this has many of the classic elements of every gothic story that features a grand house with dysfunctional rich family and the usual array of brooding men, disgruntled servants, secret liaisons, missing letters and locked doors. It’s Jane Eyre meets Rebecca complemented with a dash of Downton Abbey, the Yorkshire glooms as per Wuthering Heights and much gas-lighting - in both the illuminative and psychological senses.
 
The writing, descriptions and historical detail are fine and although it is true to the Edwardian era there is the odd modernism or anachronism in dialogue that occasionally leaps out *. However, the penultimate paragraph is a gem and may make you re-evaluate everything you have taken to be true in the story.

I enjoyed it well enough while reading it, but perhaps I've read too many similar books and it didn’t quite do as much for me as it seems to have done for the majority of reviewers elsewhere.
 
Three stars.


Booktopia
 
Amazon.com
 
Amazon.co.uk


* If someone can prove to me that toasting marshmallows on forks over fires was common practice in mid-late 19th Century Australia - as opposed to America - then I stand corrected. 


0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Categories

    All

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    October 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    October 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015

    See
    Historical Novel Society
    ​
    for my reviews of historical fiction
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • MMMusings
  • Blogs
  • About Me
  • My Books
  • Book Reviews
  • FAMILY TALES