Rose Tremain certainly knows how to set up intrigue. On page one of her new novel, 16-year-old Lily, a soft-spoken, dimple-cheeked Victorian seamstress, is imagining her own death. The hangman’s noose tightens, her legs dangle like a “cloth doll”, her neck snaps, her heart stops. Hanging is inevitable, she believes. She is only free because “nobody knows yet that she is a murderer”.
Tremain, the author of 16 novels, has an impressive track record of engaging but thematically intricate historical works. Restoration, her 1989 Booker-shortlisted novel set in the court of Charles II, brought her literary fame (it became a 1995 film produced by Harvey Weinstein and starring Meg Ryan). The 1999 Whitbread-winning Music and Silence explored 17th-century Denmark, with an English lute player in the court of Christian IV. More recently, The Gustav Sonata (2016) elegantly explored a post-Second World War friendship between two Swiss boys.
Set in a distinctly Dickensian London, Lily feels like more familiar territory. Scenes from the seamstress’s present life working at a wig emporium run by the colourful, kindly Belle Prettywood alternate with flashbacks to an outrageously grim childhood, which begins on a freezing night when a young policeman, Sam Trench, finds a newborn Lily at the gates of Bethnal Green park. Wolves have nipped off her little toe. He rushes her to the Coram Foundling Hospital, saving her life.
Like all foundlings, Lily spends her first six years with a foster family. She is lucky, finding herself in the embrace of a loving Suffolk clan on the idyllic Rookery Farm. But on her sixth birthday her beloved foster mother must, by law, return her to Coram. The trauma begins.
The horrors of the Foundling Hospital have been well documented, most recently in Justine Cowan’s 2021 memoir, The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames, which unearthed her mother’s brutal 1940s childhood as a foundling. Coram operated then exactly as it had in Victorian times, and Tremain plunges Lily into this historically accurate horror show. On arrival her head is shaved, her possessions removed, her farm clothes stripped off. The psychopathic “Nurse Maud” informs her that her foster family never loved her, and she must atone for her birth mother’s sins. She is beaten, starved, sexually abused. She befriends a fellow foundling, Becky, and they briefly escape but are soon returned. Separated, Lily knits her friend a scarf. What Becky does with it could be lifted from the grimmest pages of a Thomas Hardy novel.
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The Dickensian tropes are all here: foggy alleys, starving orphans, flamboyant names, a gruesome murder. There is an almost-love story involving Lily’s saviour Sam (who is now a detective inspector). A subtler, more interesting fairytale theme fizzles beneath the melodrama with hungry mythical wolves, an evil nurse, two flawed fairy godmothers and a carriage trip to the ball (the garish Covent Garden opera), but the main narrative, despite its traumas, feels safe and undemanding. More escapist than genius, Lily is cosy and familiar, expertly beguiling, but without the edgier sophistication of Tremain’s finest works.
Lily: A Tale of Revenge by Rose Tremain
Chatto £18.99 pp288
