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emma_victorian 's review for:
Mrs England
by Stacey Halls
Enjoyable, well written and well researched yarn with a good sense of mystery & tension. It dragged a little with a lot of threads that came to nothing but it was also engaging and emotionally astute. To compare the author with Hilary Mantel is unfair for Halls does her genre really well but looks a tad shabby next to Mantel's genius (as does much historical fiction). The novel is heavy handed & cumbersome at times, and I found the evasiveness coy & frustrating - we know Nurse May has a secret and it's not being revealed to us before our very eyes. The final reveal - basically a tale of gaslighting & domestic abuse - is not far from the extreme neglect of Mrs England's own family, which seems to be completely surmountable in the end. If Mr England is without fortune, what does she inherit on his death or does her family pay her off? And what of Mr England, the uppity solicitor's son used by a wealthy family to marry off their daughter - hardly well treated in turn. And is that a final twist in the last line? Are we to read everything about Mr E aligned to Mrs E's version of events? So of loving detail about towels and pots and prams but what really happened is more hinted and assumed.