In a detailed afterword to her new novel Learned by Heart, Emma Donoghue outlines her decades-long interest in Anne Lister, the 19th-century English diarist whose secret five-million-word journals documenting her many lesbian love affairs over the course of her relatively short, eventful life are considered one of the seminal texts of queer literary history. The afterword singles out Helena Whitbread’s first collection of decoded excerpts from Lister’s journals, I Know My Own Heart (1988), as a ground-breaking text and pays tribute to the showrunner Sally Wainwright, whose HBO-BBC series Gentleman Jack brought Lister’s life and exploits into mainstream culture.
Donoghue’s observation of Wainwright as someone “who grasps so well how history and entertainment can work hand in hand” could easily double as a description of the writer’s own work. From the 1918 flu pandemic of The Pull of the Stars, to her meticulous depiction of monastic life and asceticism in Haven, Donoghue excels at turning historical eras and settings into compelling, believable fiction. Like the best teachers at school, she packs the learning and knowledge in without the reader ever getting bored. Nothing is laboured; her skill is her lightness of touch.
Learned by Heart, as the title suggests, contains plenty of wisdom and erudition. The setting of a girls’ boarding school in 1805, the real-life Manor School for Young Ladies in York, provides a suitable backdrop. The story centres on Lister’s friendship and love affair with another student, 14-year-old Eliza Raine, whose tragic trajectory thereafter makes for poignant reading.
Donoghue cleverly makes Eliza (known as Raine to Lister) the narrator of the story, giving voice to a woman who was marginalised, first by birth — born in Madras to an English father and Indian mother — and latterly when her relationship with Lister ended. An inset narrative in the form of letters from Raine to Lister 10 years on from their school days shows the extent of the damage.
Air fare wars: Why summer flight prices are nosediving - and where to find the best bargains
Kneecap: ‘Paul Mescal was flirting with us. He was wearing Adidas shorts, not GAA shorts. It’s all a farce’
‘I am divorced at 60, envious of my ex-husband’s new life and struggling with loneliness’
Look inside the most expensive house sold in Dublin so far this year
The historical setting of the Manor comes alive in glorious detail, from the slanted dormer bedroom that Lister and Raine call “the Slope”, to the wall etchings made by pupils of centuries past, to the fact that the school needed other tenants to stay afloat: “A woodcarver, workshops of comb cutters and glove makers, not to mention the huge boar that occupies a small room on the ground floor.” The depressingly patriarchal social mores of the era are seen in the schooling and lessons — the flute is considered too manly, there are black marks for greed, indecorum and disputatiousness, merits for deportment and courtesy.
Lister is a great foil in this regard, a woman who resists the status quo: “But if the mind’s constantly trained to remember rather than to reason, won’t the faculty of memory become overdeveloped and the mind be left lopsided? … Are we girls sent to school just to keep us out of the way until our services are required, Raine? Don’t our lives belong to us at all?” Raine meanwhile is in a double bind, battling not only sexism but the pervasive racism of the day. Her longing and her considerable efforts to fit in with the other schoolgirls, and society at large, make her a hugely sympathetic heroine.
In addition to her fiction, Donoghue is a renowned playwright and screenwriter. While some of her novels — for instance, The Wonder or her Booker-shortlisted bestseller Room — leverage her aptitude for suspense and intrigue, Learned by Heart is a different kind of read. The pace is slower, a book more interested in character than plot.
A fellow classmate, the ominously named Mercy, brings a hint of danger but the lasting damage comes not from external sources but rather, more perniciously, from within the relationship itself: “It’s the first act of the piece, performed once only. It comes to Eliza that she’ll be reliving these brief days for the rest of her life.”
It’s a big statement, but Donoghue shows us, scene after scene, how something like that can come to pass. Lister is an intensely vibrant character who lights up the school, her classmates and teachers with her atypical interests, insatiable curiosity and restless intelligence. She seems in a way the ideal character for Donoghue, loaded with arcane knowledge, Latin maxims, historical facts, opinions galore, all of which she delivers in a breezy style in keeping with her character.
“Being with Lister is not what Eliza thought best-friendship would be: a soothing support. Lister unsettles and thrills her as if something’s about to topple from a shelf.” Over the course of this enthralling novel, Donoghue lets the friendship deepen and develop, until it becomes something unique to Raine and Lister, a relationship of their own invention, memorably, fittingly described as: “Nothing that needs explaining to them; nothing they could explain to anyone else.”
