Th e Widows of Malabar Hill , Sujata Massey (Soho Crime, 2018) The Widows of Malabar Hill is the first book in the 1920s mystery series featuring Perveen Mistry, Bombay’s first and only woman lawyer. Like all good mysteries, it’s got plenty of secrets at its heart. The central secret is, of course, kept by the murderer. But there are other secrets, such as the secrets of an adulterer or an embezzler. There are the secrets of a marriage, the things one partner keeps from anther; secrets within a household; and secrets around normal bodily functions such as menstruation, during which, in some families, women are kept apart from the rest of the family. Even the buildings have secrets: tunnels, screened windows, locked rooms. Not all the secrets are sinister. Perveen’s father, in his determination to protect his daughter, keeps things from her. Perveen hides her unhappiness from her parents as she doesn’t want to worry them. The secrecy surrounding the lives of the three widows, who l...

Is there such a thing as a sense of place? Do places have atmospheres that we can sense? And how can historical novelists harness these responses in their fiction? I recently spoke to best-selling author Nicola Cornick about her timeslip novels for the Historical Novels Review, February 2022. The article is republished here and is also available on my website as a PDF document.  At a 2021 conference on ‘Imagining History: Wales in Fiction and Fact’, Dr Marian Gwyn remarked, “historical fiction teaches us how people and places connect”. (1) For readers of historical fiction, a sense of place is an important element establishing not only the physical milieu of a novel, but also the historical one. This is often achieved, as the familiar mantra has it, by evoking the “sights, sounds and smells” of a setting, that is, through the senses of the people in it. A sense of place is created by the characters connected with it. However, setting may have another function besides conveying a...

  I look at two stories of twentieth-century working-class lives this month - Raymond Williams's 1960 novel, Border Country , and Dorothy Whipple's High Wages . Williams explore the lives of a family living in a small rural community on the borders of Wales and England, and Whipple looks at the challenges faced by an ambitious shop assistant in a Lancashire town. Border Country , Raymond Williams (Chatto & Windus, 1960) The borders in Raymond Williams’s fine novel are geographic, emotional, social and existential. Geographically, it is situated in the Welsh marches in Glynmawr, a fictitious Welsh village so close to England its inhabitants can nip over for a drink on Sundays, when pubs in Wales are closed. The characters also cross other borders: Matthew Price, son of a working class couple, was brought up in Glynmawr but is now a university lecturer living in London. Summoned to his father’s sick bed, he returns to his home country, where he finds the dissonance between ...

Latchkey Ladies , Marjorie Grant (Handheld Press 2022, first published 1921) The work women did during the First World War, when many moved into occupations formerly carried out by men, is often viewed as a gateway to liberation. The new skills they learned and the wider variety of jobs available to them gave them the chance to earn more than they could in traditionally female occupations (though still, usually, less than men). Women could now afford to live independently, either on their own or sharing with others. Now, at last, women had stepped out of the cage. Or so the story goes. It’s interesting, then, to find a different perspective in Latchkey Ladies , for the women in this novel do not want these new-found freedoms. They do not want to be single, and they do not want to go out to work. For them entry into the work place does not mean liberation, it means mind-numbing drudgery. The possession of a latchkey to their own rooms does not mean independence, it means loneliness;...