The Rose Garden by Tracy Rees is the first book that I’ve read by the author and although I enjoyed it in parts it did have problems for me as there were at least a couple of glaring historical mistakes in it and the relationships between the women seemed unlikely to me.
The setting is 1895 London where Mabs is working as a docker, dressed as a boy to get the work as obviously females can’t work there. Her mother is dead, her grieving father has taken to drink, and she and her younger siblings are facing starvation. Against all the odds Mabs gets a job as a companion to Abigail a woman who has just moved to London from Durham with her husband and children. Abigail seems selfish and spoiled to Mabs and not ill at all, but the husband has asked Mabs to spy on his wife and Mabs realises that things are not at all as she was led to believe. Olive Westwater is a spinster, only child of very wealthy parents and at 28 she doubts that she will ever marry, but she has a yen to have a child and so adopts a three year old girl against her parents’ wishes. Through Olive the lives of them all become woven together and when Abigail’s situation becomes dire it’s to Olive that Mabs turns to for help.
I was unable to suspend my disbelief in this premise, it just seemed far too unlikely for me, but if you aren’t as pernickety about details as I am then it won’t bother you.
The glaring historical mistakes are a mention of the phrase ‘the elephant in the room’ which is a very modern phrase, apparently first used in the US in 1935 but it didn’t reach the UK until years after that, probably around 1990 by my reckoning. The author had difficulty writing the voices of the various characters. There’s just no way that a wealthy and genteel Victorian lady would have used the word ‘guff’. The other mistake was that one of the young girls in the absolutely poverty stricken family which could barely afford food was still at school aged 15. Poor children back then left school at 12 and particularly in England free secondary schooling wasn’t available until 1944 and even then most people left school at the age of 14. The Scottish education system has always been different and we had free education decades before England had.
Also there is just no way that a seventeen year old girl could have got work at the docks even dressed as a boy. In those days, and up until comparatively recently (1960s) dockers were hired by the day and had to stand every morning looking fit and strong, hoping to be chosen to work a shift that day. A skinny girl would never have passed muster under those circumstances. These are all problems that should have been picked up by an editor but maybe nobody cares that there are big holes in the plot. Maybe I’m weird to be bothered by things like that – but that’s just me!
My thanks to Pan Macmillan for sending me a digital copy of this book via NetGalley.
Those anachronisms would have bothered me too – they throw me right out of a story. And I would have had difficulty in believing in a woman working as a docker too.
FictionFan,
I know exactly what you mean, my brain was too busy being annoyed by it all and wondering how a well-known writer of historical fiction could be so clueless.
Those of us who read widely do tend to get hung up on accuracy. I got cross a few books ago by the detective and his assistant having a “Ploughman’s lunch” in a pub in the early 1930s, when such things certainly wouldn’t have been available (1950s Cheese Marketing Board invention). Mind you, I was already pretty miffed by being conned by the book’s cover which was cunningly made to look very similar to the British Library Crime Classic series. In fact it was written by an Australian in the 21st century!
Janet,
How annoying, I think a few publishers have jumped on that vintage crime cover bandwagon, but I hadn’t realised they might be written so recently. That “Ploughman’s lunch” would have jumped out at me too I think it’s important for writers to be avid readers too, then they might not make such mistakes!