Mrs England

 
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.


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* 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. 

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