Books Alive- "Esme Lennox" is a wonderful book

“The vanishing act of Esme Lennox” by Maggie O’Farrell is one of the books listed in this year’s guide “50 books you can’t put down”. The main character, Esme, has an unhappy childhood in colonial India, and later finds herself a troubled woman in 1930’s Edinburgh. Unable to fit into society, she is betrayed by her sister and edited out of the family history for over sixty years. Then, a young woman, Iris, discovers a great-aunt she never knew she had; Esme.

This is what author, Maggie O’Farrell, had to say on her website when asked what inspired her to write this novel: “It is a novel I’ve wanted to write for a long time. I first had the idea – of a woman who is incarcerated in an asylum for a lifetime – fifteen years ago. I tried to write it then, as my first novel, but it didn’t work and I ended up abandoning it to write After You’d Gone instead. This was in the mid nineties, after Thatcher’s Care in the Community Act, when psychiatric hospitals were being closed down and patients turfed out. There were a lot of stories flying around at that time of people, particularly women, like Esme who had been put away for reasons of immorality and left to rot. A friend told me about his grandmother’s cousin, who had just died in an asylum, having been put there in her early twenties for “eloping with a legal clerk”. The idea never went away and I gradually amassed more and more stories and examples of girls who had been committed in the early Twentieth century for little more that being disobedient or recalcitrant. When you start to dig a little deeper, into case notes and medical reports, the findings are terrifying. I’ve always been interested in the idea of what happens to the same type of woman – uncompromising, unconventional, refusing to fit into the domestic role society has set out for her – at different times in history. Centuries ago, she might have been condemned as a witch but as recently as sixty years ago she might have been deemed insane and committed to an asylum.” (http://www.maggieofarrell.com/bio2.html) Sounds like an interesting premise for a book, doesn’t it?

Well, I was intrigued when I read this, and I took the book home at the first opportunity. It thoroughly lived up to my expectations. It was well written, and I couldn't wait to get back to reading it. Between sections of narrative, the thoughts of one character seague into those of another, but I never found it confusing. I found the characters believable and moving and I have since recommended it to several friends. Thank you for a wonderful book, Maggie O'Farrell.