This novel focuses on two real people: Eliza Raine and her friend Anne Lister, pupils at an English boarding school in the early 1800s. As the background notes at the end helpfully explain, Eliza was born in Madras in 1791 to an East India company surgeon from Yorkshire and the unknown Indian woman he lived with. In 1797, aged six, she and her older sister Jane were shipped to Yorkshire by their father. When he died, in 1800, he left his daughters the substantial sum of £4000 each, providing an income and passing to them when they married or turned 21. Their powerless mother had an allowance until she died two years later.
In 1803, their guardian sent them to Miss Hargrave’s Manor School in York to prepare them for wifedom. Eliza was 14 when Lister, born the same year, arrived in 1805 to share her attic bedroom.
Though few will have heard of Eliza, Anne is now a historical celebrity. An enormous amount of work has gone into researching and publishing her 26-volume diaries and reconstructing her life as an independent lesbian landowner, traveller and mountaineer, who “married” some of her many partners. Gentleman Jack, an acclaimed BBC TV series based on her later life, began screening in 2019.
Within a superbly detailed, credible context of strict but relatively enlightened girls’ education at the start of the 19th century, Donoghue brings the two remarkable young women, their circumstances and their relationship vividly to life. She rescues Eliza – or Raine, as Lister always calls her – from her obscure place as Lister’s first known intimate friend and sexual partner, establishing her as distinctive, significant and utterly engaging in her own right. Strong historical currents of gender, sexuality, race, empire and class intersect in her recreated story, giving it dimensions beyond Lister’s own.
The disconcerting opening section, “Raine to Lister, 1815″, is the first of five imagined, unfinished letters Eliza writes but never sends from Clifton House, the private asylum where she has lived for two years. They intersperse five chapters covering August 1805 to May 1806, when Lister left the school.
Through a third-person narrative centred on Eliza, these chapters brilliantly convey her developing, complex understanding of herself, Lister, and their intense connection. Ignored by her sister, isolated, lonely and acutely aware of her “difference”, Eliza embraces Lister as her missing other half. They embark on a strongly erotic sexual relationship, secretly sustained within the close confines of the school.
Not until the heartbreaking sixth and final letter, written before and after a brief visit from Lister, does Eliza begin to reveal more of what she has gone through: “… stupidly slow to grasp my gradual bereavement … I lived on dwindling rations of your company, your letters, your attention. Four years since I settled in Halifax, to be near you and your family – but you stayed away on one pretext or another, mostly with your Isabella. Little by little over the years, I lost you, like coins dropping one by one through a hole in my pocket.”
In the end, all she asks “is for the memory of me to haunt you as you haunt me. Let our spirits touch and go on touching always, the way one page presses itself against the next.”
Some readers will not want to know any more, but I valued the poignant notes at the end. As early as 1808, Lister began a long string of overlapping involvements with other women. Raine slowly “came to terms with the fact that Lister was never going to settle down with her”. At 23, with no settled home or sustained caring support, her life “fell apart”. She was, somewhat dubiously, declared a lunatic in 1816 – a decision backed by Lister, who believed she would inherit Raine’s money and unsuccessfully attempted to become her guardian. Lister died in 1840, aged 49; Raine survived her by 20 years.
