We also meet Luke, a 15-year-old press-ganged aboard the warship Essex and desperate to escape. The Quaker family she has married into is against such dangerous activity, whatever the tenets of their faith, and Honor, by now pregnant, finds herself in a mesh of conflicting loyalties complicated by her feelings for a slave hunter.Īs ever, Chevalier wears her historical learning lightly, elegantly conveying the fervour surrounding abolition, although it’s the minutiae that is brightest here – the domestic details of Honor’s life far away from home and the cleverly concealed, everyday dramas faced by those determined to help slaves on the run.įinally, a quote from Sarah Waters emblazons the front cover of Kate Worsley’s She Rises (Bloomsbury) – surely publisher’s code for ‘lesbian historical action within’.Īnd indeed, She Rises is a briny novel of repressed desire as Louise, a dairymaid recently in the service of a wealthy Harwich captain, becomes fascinated by her mistress Rebecca, his daughter.
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