Historical novels often reflect the concerns of the period in which they were written as much as they do the period in which the story is set. The rise of the middle class, the oppression of the poor and the futility of war were staples of early- to mid-20th century historical tales. Those written by women late last century and early in this will focus on the question of women’s independence and their rights to literacy and birth control. Central characters are often bluestockings – literate women rejecting suitors and campaigning for the right for universal education.
In 1998, Sarah Waters published her first novel, Tipping the Velvet, a sensual, erotic book set in the Victorian era, and so pioneered what is now a celebrated genre, the queer Victorian tale. A couple of decades later, it seems that the same-sex love affair is a required trope in historical fiction written by gay and straight women writers.
Stacey Halls’ The Household meets that requirement, as well as another frequently encountered ingredient in contemporary historical works. Real-life famous figures play their part: in this case, Charles Dickens and Angela Burdett-Coutts.
The inclusion of a notable immediately broadens readership and provides veracity. Coutts’ father was a well-known prison reformer and his daughter followed suit. She came into contact with Dickens, whose social conscience went beyond writing about the poor and disenfranchised to offering practical aid.
He and Coutts established Urania Cottage, a kind of halfway house for young women who had been imprisoned in Tothill Fields, Coldbath or Westminster. At Urania Cottage they learnt to read and write, to garden, cook and sew, thus becoming useful exports as wives and servants to the colonies, in particular, Australia.
Halls is apposite on the grinding poverty that drives her characters to commit their crimes – the hunger, cold, sexual exploitation and cramped, filthy living conditions. They resort either to theft or prostitution, often both. At Urania Cottage they come into the care of the redoubtable Mrs Holdsworth, who mothers and shepherds them and obeys Dickens’ draconian rules, among them that there are to be no private conversations between the young women and visiting family.
Martha is borrowed from David Copperfield, where Dickens has her as a minor character, a fallen woman who sets off out of the book never to be seen again. Halls picks her up and casts her as the first resident of Urania, better educated and healthier than the others. It is her intention to go to Australia, so when the villain encourages her to read Michael Howe: The Last and Worst of the Bush-Rangers of Van Diemen’s Land, she devours it by candlelight.
Halls tells us little about the book, or who wrote it, which supports another observed sea change in contemporary historical fiction. A writer need not bother giving details because the reader can instantly google and find out for themselves. It may also be that Halls assumes that readers will know of the bushranger from the 2013 film The Outlaw Michael Howe. She makes no note of the legend that he once cut the head off a mate in order to relieve him of a hangover, a service that is certainly memorable in an Australian kind of way.
The mention of Howe is a non sequitur among others in the novel. At one point, Coutts, who is persecuted by an insane stalker, develops peeling fingers and an angry rash around her eyes. The illness is never mentioned again. There are metaphors that fit uneasily with the illiterate women, such as their spines curling “like ammonites” due to working long hours picking oakum on prison benches.
The great strength of The Household is the dynamic of female friendship and love, romantic and sisterly. Mystery and tension are supplied by the search for missing sisters and lovers and the reality of the few choices available to them.
When desperate runaway Josephine meets her old friend Susannah, who owns her own coffee house, she observes, “Very few of her contemporaries rise like cream; most sink to the depths. To know one who has risen is to know that one’s self is sinking.”
It is a joy to read a novel rich in women characters from all levels of Victorian society. Male characters, villainous and heroic, remain in the shadows. It is what is going on among the women that matters.
The Household by Stacey Halls (Manilla, $36.99) is out now.
