Neo-Victorian Voices: Libertie, Kaitlyn Greenidge (2021)

Most of the twenty-first century written, nineteenth century set novels I’ve read, which are centered on the Black experience in the United States, have focused on the horrors of slavery (see for example, my reviews of Sadeqa Johnson’s Yellow Wife, Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention of Wings, Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s Wench, and Valerie Martin’s Property). Freedom was presented as a goal, a dream, and a destination for the characters in many of these books, with little page space given over to what freedom looked like, or even could look like, for African Americans during and after the Civil War. 

As the title of Kaitlyn Greenidge’s 2021 novel, Libertie, suggests, this is a book all about freedom. Our title character is a freeborn, Black girl in nineteenth-century Brooklyn. As a child, she witnesses her mother’s role in the Underground Railroad, smuggling enslaved people to the North in coffins. And as she grows and matures, Libertie grapples more and more with what freedom means to her. Is true liberty possible in a country so divided along race lines? Could real freedom mean starting over in the Black-led nation of Haiti? And can she shake free of the life her mother, a white-passing, Black, woman doctor, planned for her? 

This all sounds very lofty, and the novel does deal with complex history and difficult themes, but at the core of Libertie is this quieter story about the fraught, but loving, relationship between mother and daughter. At times I was frustrated with Libertie’s perspective, especially in her teenage years, but Greenidge’s depictions of the misunderstandings between the protagonist and her mother have a sharply observed psychological realism. Libertie has other important relationships too—with the grieving escapee she sees her mother “raise from the dead” at the book’s opening, with a pair of singing, Black, women college students, who she eventually realizes are romantically linked to each other, and with the Haitian man whom she marries—but it is the mother/daughter bond that makes this a compelling character-driven read.

Those who enjoy the intersection of historical fact and fiction may also want to learn more about the inspiration for the character of Libertie’s mother in the novel—Dr. Susan Smith McKinney-Steward, who was the third Black woman to earn a medical degree in the United States. 

Which nineteenth century set novel would you like to see me review next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. 

Neo-Victorian Voices: The Invention of Wings, Sue Monk Kidd (2014)

In my Neo-Victorian Voices series, I review novels set in the nineteenth-century, but written in the twenty-first. This week, it’s the turn of Sue Monk Kidd’s 2014 novel, The Invention of Wings.

The book tells the story of Sarah Grimké, based on a real abolitionist from Charleston, and Handful, a fictional character born into slavery in the Grimkés’ household. On her eleventh birthday, Sarah’s parents “gift” her the ten-year-old Handful. Already disgusted by slavery, Sarah tries to reject her “present”, marking the start of a long and complex relationship between the enslaved Handful and her reluctant “mistress”.

Handful is a compelling character and her relationship with her mother, Charlotte, was my favourite part of the novel. Charlotte, a skilled seamstress, creates story quilts telling the history of her life and those of her African ancestors and repeats fables to Handful passed down by her own mother—among them the idea that they once had wings. Handful, despite her captivity and the horrific experiences she goes through, is active in her own story. She’s more decisive than Sarah and I found myself looking forward to returning to her point of view.

Sarah, as a child, is a driven character too, longing to become a lawyer and certain in her opinions. But she spends much of the novel knocked back and unsure how to act. For me, her eventual triumph, as she and her sister tour the North lecturing in support of abolition, was a little rushed. I would have liked to see more of her coming into her own. I also wondered about her struggles with her cultural inheritance. While I know there were those born into white, slave owning families, who abhorred the “institution”, it was harder to believe that Sarah wouldn’t have internalised any of the racism around her.

Kidd’s prose is beautiful and her research shines in all the best ways as she tackles a terrible period of American history. As a writer of historical fiction, I particularly enjoyed her author’s note detailing the decisions she made and the true stories that inspired her creation of Handful. 

Overall, as with other novels about American slavery I’ve read, like Valerie Martin’s wonderful Property (2003) and Dolen Perkins-Valdez's heartbreaking Wench (2010), The Invention of Wings at times makes for painful reading, but I think fiction like this still plays a powerful role in bringing a human voice to the facts we read about in history books.

Which novel would you like to see me review next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Instagram, on Facebook, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Have you read my novel, Bronte’s Mistress, yet? It’s available in hardcover, e-book, and audiobook now, and the paperback will be published next month! For monthly updates on my writing and blog, sign up for my email newsletter below.

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Neo-Victorian Voices: Wench, Dolen Perkins-Valdez (2010)

Content warning: sexual assault; abortion

Reading novels about slavery in the nineteenth-century American South can be a gruelling experience, but Dolen Perkins-Valdez hits all the right notes in her 2010 Wench—the story of four enslaved black women who accompany their Southern masters to an Ohio vacation resort in the 1850s.

Lizzie, our protagonist, feels she loves her master, Drayle. He’s the father of her two children and he’s taught her to read and write, as well as giving her a better quality of life than that of the field slaves. But it seems unlikely that he’ll free her, or his children, and Lizzie is struggling with her own desire for independence and autonomy.

The other three women have their own battles to contend with. Mawu wants her master dead. Sweet’s pregnant—again. And Reenie’s master (who’s also her half-brother) is ‘sharing’ her with the owner of the Tawawa House resort.

With whispers of the abolition movement reaching the women, and salvation tantalisingly close in free Ohio, all four must decide whether and how to take control of their lives and what they’d risk or give up to taste freedom.

Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Perkins-Valdez does a wonderful job of teasing out the nuanced reactions to slavery from all her characters—free and enslaved, white and black. Drayle’s wife Fran is a particularly complex supporting character, reminding me of Valerie Martin’s 2003 Property, which I reviewed previously. But the four women described as their masters’ ‘wenches’ are the focus, with Lizzie’s personal emotional arc at the heart of the novel.

Some moments are difficult to read. There are descriptions of multiple sexual assaults, including one instance of rape while a character is still bleeding from terminating a pregnancy. And, while the physical violence isn’t as constant as in some depictions of slavery based largely on plantations (e.g. Twelve Years a Slave), there are several scenes of corporal punishment that aren’t for the faint-hearted.

The relationships between the women—tender and multi-faceted—though are what kept me reading (at speed). They’re believable and oh so human, even providing moments of levity and joy in this unflinching depiction of a dark and dangerous time.

What novel would you like to see the Secret Victorianist review next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook, or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Neo-Victorian Voices: March, Geraldine Brooks (2005)

Jo said sadly, "We haven't got Father, and shall not have him for a long time." She didn't say "perhaps never," but each silently added it, thinking of Father far away, where the fighting was.

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868-9) was remarkable on its publication for centring on the domestic cares and the trials and tribulations of a group of female characters—sisters Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy and their mother, Marmee. Becoming a ‘little woman’ meant facing hardships, taming your feelings and embracing self-sacrifice. The result is a beloved classic that is still read regularly by young girls and has been seen as one of the first representations of ‘all American’ femininity.

Geraldine Brooks takes this well-loved work and examines the opposite side of the coin. If Alcott tells us this is what it means to be a woman at home, what does it mean to be a man at war, and, specifically, what did it mean to be a man on the side of the North in the Civil War?

Geraldine Brooks (1955- )

In March (Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize), she takes the character of the girls’ absent father and constructs a parallel narrative to Little Women, forcing readers to confront the brutal realities of conflict, reassess the March household (in particular the parents’ marriage) and question the absolutism on many narratives concerning the North and its abolition of slavery.

One of my main criticisms of Valerie Martin’s 2003 Property, which I reviewed in this same series on my blog, was its idealised view of Northerners when it came to questions of race. Brooks doesn’t fall into the same trap. Mr March himself is liberal (you might think unbelievably so until you realise he was based on extensive research into Louisa May Alcott’s father Bronson, a vegan educator and reformer). But he is an idealist at sea in a pragmatic world, where Northerners are more than happy to take over plantations to make their fortunes, mistreating former slaves, whose lives are just as hard and more endangered now that they are no longer slaves, but ‘contraband’.

And, while in Property we are never given access to black characters’ views directly, Brooks gives us Grace, a former slave with whom March has had a sexual relationship. It is she who has the final say on March’s on-going involvement in the war:

“We have had a enough of white people ordering our existence! There are men of my own race more versed in how to fetch and carry than you will ever be. And there are Negro preachers aplenty who know the true language of our souls. A free people must learn to manage its own destiny.”

Grace is of course in a better position than many former slaves. She is well spoken and educated, due to being the illegitimate daughter of a plantation owner. But March’s life is actually saved by another black female character—Zannah. Zannah is mute (her tongue was cut out while a group of men raped her) and was totally illiterate until March’s arrival to teach on the plantation.

Her inability to communicate provides a stark contrast to Mr March. Unlike Zannah, he has the tools of language at his disposal, but he is still unable to tell the truth in his letters—instead sending Marmee and the girls a highly edited, and at times falsified, account of his time away from them.

This leaves Brooks with a plot problem. To be true to her source text, March must fall ill, prompting Marmee’s journey to Washington, and she can’t sustain this section in his first person. So, at the 200-page mark, we have a sudden shift of POV and continue the story from Marmee’s perspective.

The change is a little abrupt, and not just in tone. Marmee’s narrative doesn’t seem to be so much about developing her own character as hammering home that March’s perspective is unreliable—that a marriage can be made up of misunderstandings and resentment on both sides.  The result? The he said/she said at times feels a little overdone.

Brooks’s prose too at times tips over into the long-winded and dense, when the period could, I think, still be indicated with a lighter touch. Take for instance the following:

‘As I mentally composed these letters, it was inevitable that my mind would turn to the days when it was myself to whom such epistles had been directed. From there, my thoughts travelled in easy stages to the unravelling of my fortune, and to the exigencies of a current situation so threadbare that even my daughters are forced to toil for wages.’

But these quibbles over construction and execution are minor when compared with the overall genius of what Brooks has done, the scholarship of her research and the compelling nature of the story she has crafted from what was, in Alcott’s novel, an elision.

March doesn’t comfort like the familiar pages of Little Women. At times, it appals and horrifies. But the novels could be read as equally didactic. For Alcott, being a good woman in the nineteenth century was a story of self-improvement and self-sacrifice. For Brooks, being a good man in the nineteenth century seems to involve recognising injustice, but also recognising your own powerlessness to fight it everywhere and that pursuing your ideals could mean you’re doing an injustice to the little women waiting patiently at home.

Which novel should the Secret Victorianist read next as part of the Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Neo-Victorian Voices: Property, Valerie Martin (2003)

One of the biggest objections you could make to the otherwise accomplished novels I’ve looked at as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series is that they are often peopled with ‘Mary Sues’—idealised characters who have surprisingly 21^st-century morals and ambitions despite the 19^th-century setting.

In Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White there was the implausibly educated proto-feminist prostitute Sugar, in Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus the magical Cirque des Reves allows its inhabitants to live outside the strictures of Victorian society, and in Natasha Pulley's The Watchmaker of Filigree Street love blossoms between a civil servant and his Japanese watchmaker friend, without any internal struggles about the practicalities of pursuing an interracial homosexual relationship in 19^th-century London.

Valerie Martin (1948-)

Valerie Martin’s Property, winner of the 2003 Orange Prize, runs into no such issues. With unflinching realism it tells the story of a white plantation owner’s wife in the American South, in her own words—and her views are every bit as foreign to our modern way of thinking as you’d expect.

Manon Gaudet is a victim of a patriarchal society, epitomised by her nameless and tyrannical husband. She’s denied the right to own property or determine the course of her life and is unable to ward off her husband’s unwanted sexual advances. But she fails to note the obvious parallels between her position and that of the black slave Sarah (by whom her husband has fathered two children) or that her position is one of extreme privilege when compared to all the slaves owned and used by her husband.

Instead she is a perpetrator of abuse. She judges her husband for his cruelty in the opening moments of the novel, as he ‘tests’ the young men on the plantation and whips one for getting an erection in the course of his twisted game. But it becomes increasingly clear that she dehumanizes the slaves too, and, in one of the most shocking moments in the novel, she takes possession of Sarah’s body, just like her husband, drinking milk from her breast to comfort herself on the death of her mother.

Reading Property as a white woman makes you feel dirty, horrified to think that you might be Manon had you been born into the world she inhabits. At the start of the novel, I was worried that the villainous husband was a little too morally straightforward, that this would be a book that put the ‘blame’ for the problematic history of the American South squarely on white men, but the ending shows that this is a story about how escaping a racist patriarchy doesn’t just mean escaping one man or men. Manon is part of the problem, even if she suffers for it. And Martin isn’t going to swoop in with a moment of unlikely revelation for her, even if her protagonist is aware that others, in the North, think about black men and women differently.

Short, tautly written and quietly brilliant, Property is well worth reading—just don’t expect a happy ending.

What should the Secret Victorianist read next in the Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.