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Maman was careful never to cry in front of Father, as he didn’t like it.įather was a very distant and cold character, quietly tyrannical in his running of the house, against which Maud rebelled, and focussed on his work on the writings of an obscure female mystic from the fifteenth century, Alice Pyett Maman suffers from the triple disabilities of being female, foreign and “an inherited flaw” impeding her ability to bear children. Second-best was a dead baby and worst was a live one, because Maman cried when it died – which it always did. The best way for a groaning to end was with a bloody chamberpot, as that was soonest over. Initially, the novel seemed very family centred as Maud lies awake listening to her mother’s “groaning” at the end of her “illness” – euphemisms for her pregnancy – and not fully understanding save for the fact that

Set at the turn of the nineteenth century, Maud is a nine-year old at the start of the novel and sixteen at the conclusion of her narrative, a girl on the cusp of adulthood in a world on the cusp of modernity, but still treated as a child of the Victorians by her father, the historian Edmund Stearne, and other patriarchal authority figure in society around her: the rector, Mr Broadstairs, and the doctor, Dr Grayson.

And like any taboo forbidden place, it was immediately appealing to the child Maud. And as to the relationship of the house and the fen, it carries echoes of the conflict between the human and the natural, the rational and the fairytale, as the fen abounded with “ferishes and hobby-lanterns” which “ull hook you in to a miry death” if you don’t take care. The novel is perhaps misnamed: it focuses on the house Wake’s End set beside the local fen, some three miles from the village of Wakenhyrst and, like its protagonist, Maud Stearne, the narrative rarely leaves that house which creates a deliciously taut atmosphere.

This was my first Paver read having heard some good things about her, and it thrust me straight into a solid Gothic historical yarn with some genuinely creepy moments!