Barbara Ewing: Rosetta

Since her first novel The Actresses so skilfully dissected the peculiarly female hell of getting older when your face is your fortune, Barbara Ewing, actress and writer, has struggled for similarly authentic material.

An early baby-boomer, Ewing is a dedicated feminist. This time she takes us to 1795 when women were chattels, child bearers and, if they were lucky enough to be well-born, pawns in the forging of powerful families. But surprisingly they also had more freedom, notes Ewing, than their granddaughters living a century later.

Rosetta follows the early life of two girls who marry in 1795. Both are 17. Both are used and abused by their husbands. One learns sexual rapture, but at the hands of a disloyal, carousing husband. The other learns how her vicar husband can distort religion to legitimise his own tyranny. And eventually both learn to use their brains, connections and female wiles to triumph.

Ewing writes surely and with the kind of tension that keeps you turning the pages well after the light should be out. Her research trips to Egypt and Paris shine through her story. You can almost hear the haunting call to prayer, Allahu Akbar, smell the sweat of the bazaar, the crashing of waves at the Rosetta bar as the waters of the Nile meet the surge of the ocean.

Her characters, both men and women, are recognisable enough for you to care about them, even if only to wish them dead. And although Ewing doesn't shy away from the disgusting, such as the forced sex and the agonising death of the self-aborted 15-year-old Lottie, she writes about it with a subtlety that makes it more powerful.

She examines the great issues of the time — and all times: religion; sexuality and the tension between the sexes; the importance of the written word; money and power; the cultural chasm between East and West; and, beguilingly, the power of the quiet strength of a woman.

Overall, this is an intelligent and ambitious book. The storylines are intricate but so strongly written it makes a sprawling great read. And, in the end, Ewing manages to pull all the threads together and, satisfyingly, leave the reader with all her questions answered.

Which, perhaps, is where Ewing has not quite cracked the transition from women's fiction writer to serious modern literature, where it is not what you put in, but what you leave out that counts.

TIME WARNER BOOKS $35

* Carroll du Chateau is a Herald writer.