Learned By Heart is a historical novel that imagines the early years of the inimitable Anne Lister when she was a student at the Manor School in York and embarked upon her first love affair. The object of her love was Eliza Raine, a biracial orphan born in Madras (now Chennai) to an Indian mother and British father who served as surgeon for the East India Company. In 1797, when Eliza was six and her sister Jane was eight, their father sent the two girls to England. Three years later, he took a furlough to join them but died in transit, leaving their mother with an annual income of 24 pounds which she enjoyed for two years before dying in what we must assume was abject poverty. The father’s colleague, William Duffin, assumed care of the two girls and management of the 4,000 pounds each girl stood to inherit. By all accounts, he fulfilled his obligation with absolute integrity. These are the facts as we have them, and they position Eliza as the novel opens.
Fourteen year old Eliza Raine forms the narrative centre of the novel and we accompany her as she first encounters Anne Lister, is assigned a room with her at the Manor School (they dub the room “The Slope” for the slant of its ceilings), and falls under her spell. Donoghue interrupts the narrative with six imagined letters which an older Raine writes to Lister but never delivers. Raine composes the letters long after the novel’s action is done when she is institutionalized for mental infirmity. While we may have hints that a breakdown is coming, it is easy to pass off these destabilizing moments as the consequence of other more obvious concerns, like the fact of her status as an illegitimate child, or the fact of her darker skin. Or the fact of her sexuality in a world that has no way to accommodate it.
Donoghue’s approach to Raine’s mental health is “modern” to the extent that she avoids drawing causal and moral connections between her character’s circumstances and her behaviour. Today, we are more willing to avoid framing behaviour in causal and moral terms, recognizing that mental suffering is a complicated beast. Donoghue presents the behaviour and leaves it at that. We see this most strikingly in Raine’s fifth letter when she seems to have flipped like a switch, lashing out at Lister and exhibiting an almost entirely different personality. Donoghue doesn’t use clinical descriptions, although we can’t help but wonder if Raine isn’t bipolar and composing this letter in a manic phase. Her behaviour bears no apparent relation to the events that precede it and it shocks us, presenting a degree of psychological realism that, for me at least, is painful to witness.
The novel is largely plotless in the traditional sense. Much of the opening narrative occupies itself with the routines of the Manor School. As one would expect of an author who has written about a mother and child confined to a room and about three monks seconded to an island, the life she evokes at an early nineteenth century girl’s finishing school is claustrophobic. The matrons govern with a rule-bound strictness that rivals any corset. And the lessons are rote-based (learned by heart?), stifling the possibility of imaginative play. One of Donoghue’s gifts is her capacity to sustain the reader’s interest despite the strictures of the world she portrays. It reminds me of the writer’s classic challenge: write exciting prose about a seemingly boring situation. Donoghue proves herself more than equal to the challenge.
The excitement here comes from the emergence of love. And the dramatic tension comes from the risk that the lovers might be caught, especially after they learn that a group of men are to be hanged for analogous transgressions. We want desperately for the lovers to have their happiness, but a simple Google search tells us this can’t happen. The historic figures went their separate ways, Raine to a series of mental institutions, Lister to Shibden Hall, the family home, and a series of lovers. Even without our internet “cheating,” we’ve already stumbled over too many Shakespearean and classical allusions to suppose that the lovers will have their comic resolution.
Learned By Heart bears a strong affinity to Donoghue’s earlier novel, The Pull of the Stars. Both novels concern themselves with women’s health. In The Pull of the Stars, the narrator Julia Power is an obstetrics nurse managing the day to day disaster that is a maternity ward for women who have contracted the Spanish flu. Death is a regular visitor to the ward. Few mothers survive, and few of their children, either. In Learned By Heart, many of the girls at Manor School have lost their mothers, or their siblings, or both, to the perils of childbirth. The intervening century between the action of one novel and the next marks almost no advancement in obstetric care.
Related to this is a concern for virology. Obviously, the Spanish flu looms in the background of The Pull of the Stars. But a pandemic of a different sort—smallpox—makes its presence felt in Learned By Heart. In one scene, the girls at Manor School must line up to receive their vaccination, developed in 1796 by Edward Jenner, a scratch in the arm and then inoculation with cowpox. As the precocious Lister informs her classmates, cowpox provides us with the etymology for the word, vaccine, because the Latin word for cow is vacca.
Perhaps the strongest point of affinity is in the dynamic between the principal character and the love interest. In both novels, an insecure woman gradually develops a fondness for a boyish self-possessed lover. In The Pull of the Stars, it’s Bridie Sweeney. Like Anne Lister, she calls to mind the trickster figure. In fact, in both instances, Donoghue risks reducing a vital character to a type. In my personal estimation, this is more a problem in Donoghue’s handling of Bridie Sweeney. In Learned By Heart, while Donoghue first presents Anne Lister as a puckish character whose primary function is to prod Eliza Raine into some measure of personal insight, that changes as the novel progresses. Things become more complicated. By the time the novel draws to a close, it is Raine who is prepared to throw caution aside, and it is Anne who reminds her of practical concerns, not least the fact that her newfound sense of abandon will have the effect of outing Anne, too, and before she is ready.
In her notes, Donoghue writes of “our culture’s belated readiness for the extraordinary Anne Lister” which perhaps betrays Donoghue’s settlement in a southern Ontario town where her words ring true(ish). However, when I witness wider cultural shifts both immediately south of the border and elsewhere around the globe, I worry that her statement may be premature. As I scan the news, I hear daily calls for a narrow conformity, for a pernicious intolerance, and they buzz like a pestilence. That said, I would love for Donoghue’s words to be true and hope that novels like Learned By Heart can spur us to embrace a wider account of what it means to love.
More links:
Nouspique on The Pull of the Stars.
Nouspique on Haven.