This title came to my attention through a "Books you might have missed in 2020" list and I was intrigued by Elizabeth Gilbert’s description on the cover — ‘Like both a classical ghost story and a modern (and very timely) scream of female outrage’. The Illness Lesson is set in 1871, on a farm outside Boston, and I quite enjoy reading stories of other times.
Clare Beams’ story collection We Show What We Have Learned won the Bard Fiction Prize and was a Kirkus Best Debut of 2016; as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. I knew Clare's writing was well regarded, but could she sustain this reader’s interest during a full novel? I am here to tell you that she most definitely can!
The Illness Lesson is filled with vivid prose, an underlying apprehension throughout, and an unsettling revealing of the thinking of the time which resonates with the 21st-century #MeToo revelations. Men control women’s education, their bodies, and even in the 19th century, it is a violation.
'This novel is powerful, exploring how women doubt themselves and cede their bodies and minds to others.'
- Jane Cowell
Caroline Hood, now in her late twenties, is the daughter of well-renowned philosopher Samuel Hood and has never left her father’s side. Her mother died when she was very young and she only has her father’s version of her mother to cling to. Samuel Hood’s initial school for young men failed, however, Samuel has ensured his daughter is educated, guiding her intellectual development in thinking, philosophy and literature, which is unusual for the time.
A flock of red birds, the trilling hearts, return to the farm and Samuel interprets this as a sign that he is to open a school for girls. Caroline is not convinced but has rarely challenged her father’s ideas, and with an acolyte of Samuel’s arriving to assist in the teaching, the school comes into being.
This novel is powerful, exploring how women doubt themselves and cede their bodies and minds to others. Caroline’s mother and one of the student’s fathers, who attended Samuel’s precious Birch School for young men that failed, are the ghosts that seep through the narrative. It is a very different novel, beautifully understated as we follow Caroline as she struggles to the decision that she must confront the all-male authorities in her world. Totally recommend this read.