KEY POINTS:
Barbara Ewing is the kind of writer who takes a vaguely interesting subject and turns it round and round, finds her own angle, slaps its bottom and makes a damn good story out of it. This time her central subject is the old practice of mesmerism. Not quite hypnotism, which was to follow, mesmerism is the act of bringing other people under the influence, both physically and mentally, of the mesmerist.
Discovered by Anton Mesmer who perfected the system, mesmerists worked by repeatedly passing their hands closely over their subjects, until they allowed themselves to succumb to the energy of the mesmerist. Willing subjects went into a sort of trance-like state, that could carry them through times of trauma and even surgery.
It wasn't science and it didn't always work - but in an age when there were no anaesthetics, no personal therapists, and no sex instruction for young women - mesmerism turned out to be the perfect career for out-of-work actresses.
Like all Ewing's books, feminism and irritation with a society that shrugs off women once they reach a certain age, is never far from the surface. But whereas in her first novel, The Actresses, discrimination was reasonably subtle, here, in 19th-century London, it definitely is not. By 40, writes Ewing, actresses were considered fit only for "old women's" parts.
Enter Miss Cordelia Preston, whose big mistake was to try and fool the English class system. The daughter of an actress, who started her on stage as a baby, she learned early that she could speak like a gentlewoman. By her teens she had also perfected the art of dressing and moving like a lady but with that earthy glint in the eye that gentlemen, especially, found alluring.
Despite a performance that lasted a decade, Cordelia is outsmarted by a callous nobleman who tricked her into producing three children out of wedlock then kidnapped all three. Totally powerless, alone, destitute and already too old to be an actress, she returned to Bloomsbury where she took up the emerging career of mesmerism. Again she employed her acting talents, and helped along by stars on the ceiling, scarves around her beautiful neck and a slice of genius inherited from her aunt who was one of London's first mesmerists, she puts up her plaque.
Within months, the over-wrought daughters of the gentlewomen she tried to imitate are making their way to her door. And in a particularly Barbara Ewing flash of inspiration, Cordelia also starts instructing these ignorant, soon-to-be-married girls on the secrets of the marriage bed.
The resulting story romps through the fish heads, rotten stews and mud of a basement flat in an actor's London with detail you can almost smell. The triumphs, tragedies and murders come thick and fast as do the surprises and intrigues of Britain's hypocritical class system. The characters are sexy and coarse enough to be believable. The women are strong.
And throughout, Ewing sticks to her formula: a rigorously researched study of mesmerism as it was practised in the 19th century (complete with a mastectomy with only mesmerism for pain relief) combined with a fast-paced, cleverly written story and this time with added pace and tension that kept me reading into the night.
- Sphere, $36.99
