(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
By and large this reviewer, an habitual buyer of books even though his TBR is threatening to collapse on him at some point in the not-too-distant future, doesn’t usually have books bought for him.
But when that does happen, when someone does take the chance that (a) I haven’t already bought the book and (b) I will love the backcover blurb, the results can be absolutely wonderful.
Take the recent gifting of By Her Hand by Marion Taffe by my dear friend Lanie who took a punt that I would read historical fiction, or at least this particular novel from the genre, even though, ahem, historically, I haven’t read many of these types of books (strangely enough while I love history, historical fiction is often not my thing for reasons I can’t quite fathom).
Her punt has well and truly paid off with this quite marvellous novel not only serving up a fulsomely invigorating narrative that pays as much attention to character as it does the events they live through and influence, but a thoughtfulness of emotion and societal observation, particularly from a grounded feminist perspective, that adds an impressive amount of richness to an already substantially beguiling story.
It’s rare to have a book that combines story and substance as well as By Her Hand does, with its richly meaningful ruminative feel beautifully balanced by an emotiveness that is always present and palpably real but which never reduces the story to melodramatic mush.
‘Run, run,’ she breathed.
I was crying. How could I run? I wanted to wake up again, to kiss her forehead, to feed our hens and feel their warm eggs in my hands. Elfled’s fingers gripped the timber. She screamed at me now, to run.
By Her Hand is the story of Freda, a 12-year-old girl living in a rural village in the Peak District, Mercia in 910 AD, and while her life is on the whole bucolically lovely with a great deal time given over to foraging in the woods and listening to the folk tales of her people, hers is an existence marred by great tragedy, only some of which she is aware.
A talented storyteller who one day dreams of writing rich tales of her own – once she learns to read and write, of course, not high priorities in a hardscrabble rural existence where war is an ever present threat with the native English at war with the raiding and land-occupying Danes – Freda is someone whom you know, given the right circumstances, will be one of those people who will make a real mark on life.
But all that promise seems to be cast to the wind when one terrible day, her village is attacked by a rapacious enemy, leaving as the sole survivor of a life now lost to the ages.
She is as traumatised and grief-stricken as you would imagine she would be, but before she can grapple with any of that, and how does someone so young with no one in her corner do that exactly, she is whisked off to an abbey far from her home by a bishop on the rise who sees a chance to use Freda’s great loss to further burnish his rise up into England’s elite.
(courtesy official author website)
That, you might think, is that for someone so young and powerless, but Freda’s unwanted new home soon becomes an unlikely haven with the young girl taught to read and write as she becomes friends with some of the other young women learning to live an assumed pious life before God.
But of course, then as now, the church isn’t as squeaky clean as the PR might suggest, and while people like the Mother of the abbey and some of the other oblates take it all very seriously, others do not, and in an age where you assume religious piety is real and unconfected, it becomes clear that humanity will find a way even in an age where it’s not supposed to.
By Her Hand does a seamless job of representing a society where the church is all powerful and you must be seen to be doing the right thing at all times – Freda owes her position and life to go along with this even if the falsehoods that underpin her new world chafe at her sense of truthfulness and integrity – but where people realise that what is demanded of them is not always right nor possible.
And while Freda is hardly an object of rebellion, she does push the envelope where she can, even going so far as to write her own stories in an age where you were supposed to value only the Word of God and no other, lest you fall into self-serving sin.
I felt tears building. Mother ordered Berhtie be confined to the dorter. She sent Wufild and me to the church to prostrate ourselves and pray through the evening meal. We were to dwell in prayer on Eve’s sin, God’s righteous indignation and the Fall of Man. We were to be silent until given permission to speak. All I did was pray for Berhtie.
Freda isn’t trying to rebel necessarily; she just wants to be herself and be creative, and as the restrictive oversight of the bishop suffocates her life, she finds an outlet, not only in her creative expressions but in her unexpected and unlikely friendship with Æthelflæd, known as the Lady of the Mercians who ruled from 911 to 918 AD.
It is this friendship, and the manoeuvres of the bishop whose actions are aimed at serving his interests but which inadvertently serve Freda’s interests too, that propels the protagonist of By Her Hand to a life where she must choose – does she simply meekly go along with the status quo and have her rights as a woman and a creative soul roundly ignored and manipulated for others’ ends or does she take a stand and fight to control her own story?
It’s this fight for agency at a time when that is not an option open to many, let alone many women, that powers By Her Hand, a remarkable book which is historically accurate to an impressive degree but which also wonders to compelling effect what might happen when someone defied the edicts of the day amd fought for their agency?
It’s a masterful and highly affecting work with a wholly rich and fully-rounded protagonist at its richly beating heart that is able to go epically big and emotionally intimate all at once, imbuing By Her Hand with a an expansive tableau that is also charmingly small, intensely meaningful and so involving that you will find it hard to pull away from the story and be wholly sad when it comes to a profoundly satisfying end.