"The Mansfield sisters were a fortress"

Recommending The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis

Many - most? - of the sister novels I read (and write!) are about sisterly division and competition, or about difference and definition, where character is revealed through contrast between siblings. But here’s a book I read recently that takes a different approach: The Hounding, by Xenobe Purvis.

US cover - I love it

In this historical novel, set in the eighteenth century, in a small English village, the Mansfield sisters live with their grandfather, having lost both parents some time ago, and recently also their grandmother. There are five girls, aged from six to perhaps seventeen. They are ‘Anne, Elizabeth, Hester, Grace, Mary’ - their names strung together as a chant on the very first page. Not that they are simply some homogenous lump. Anne is the eldest, Elizabeth is the pretty one, Hester is a tomboy, Grace is timid, and Mary is the youngest. But they are a unit. There’s a self-containment about them that even their grandfather senses and feels excluded by - and their togetherness doesn’t go down well among the villagers in Little Nettlebed. Throughout this beautifully written novel, we’re given a range of perspectives on the Mansfield sisters.

Here’s Temperance, the publican’s wife:

The girls themselves had always seemed separate from the goings-on of the village, distant somehow. Their grandfather didn’t like them to mingle, thinking perhaps that they were better than the people of little Nettlebed. They went around in twos or threes, or very often all together. Dressed in black, now; always unsmiling.

Here’s Pete, the malevolent ferryman:

Five girls were waiting there, old Joseph Mansfield’s granddaughters. At first, through mottled glass, the girls looked odd to him, changed somehow: pale faces lined up in a row, like petals roughly shaken from a rosebush. Wild, inhuman – not girls at all. Five drifts of snow. Five fallen moons.

And here’s Agnes, Pete’s intended:

She shared with her parents a keen interest in the doings of the Mansfields. Her father viewed Joseph Mansfield with professional envy; her mother didn’t like the size of his house. Agnes was jealous of the closeness the sisters shared, their tight, inward-looking circle. Her own two sisters were married and mean.

Then there is Thomas, a young farmhand who goes to live and work with the family:

They were like a rich tapestry, he thought, beautiful to look at but more interesting, more rewarding, on closer observation. He saw how the threads interwove, how one complemented the rest. He saw alliances form and then draw apart. He saw how they braided together, how they were at their strongest when all five threads pulled around each other.

Even their grandfather, who loves them dearly, finds their togetherness hard to penetrate or understand. He ‘could never keep up with their shifting allegiances’ and it’s their self-sufficiency, at least in part, that draws them into trouble with the villagers.

It’s been an unusually hot summer in Little Nettlebed. Drought threatens crops and livelihoods. Tempers are frayed. People are superstitious, and suspicious. Strong, independent women are an affront to a certain kind of male ego - as true today as it was in the eighteenth century. Pete talks of the sisters to Thomas, ‘as though he were describing cuts of meat at the market’, and even Thomas, drawn to the girls, and particularly the eldest, Anne, finds the sisters don’t act as he expects:

He’d been taught to believe that girls – especially ones who lived in a house like this – should be elegant and quiet, their laughs like musical instruments, their hands plump and clean. These girls weren’t like that at all. They were funny and loud. Their laughter came in shouts. He was enchanted by them, even over the space of a single meal.

UK cover - eek, not for me!

When trouble comes for the Mansfield sisters, even those in the village who feel favorably disposed toward the girls get swept up in the drama. The Hounding shows us how a rumor can take on a life of it’s own, and how being different can be dangerous, especially if the climate is ripe:

…even these people, the ones who urged caution as the story spread, looked within their hearts and found there a dark mistrust of the Mansfields. They were not normal, those girls. The story confirmed for everybody what they had always known: there was something unnatural about the five sisters.

What is the rumor, I hope you are asking? What is the threat? Well, as the book is not out yet and I’m reviewing it for the Historical Novel Review’s August magazine, I’m going for a no-spoilers approach, and can’t tell you more. Let’s just say the sisters will need to be every inch the ‘fortress’ they are described as, when a torrent of ill-will and superstition turns their way.

While you’re waiting for The Hounding to hit the shelves of your local bookshop or library, here are a couple of novels it reminded me of, both of which I’m happy to recommend.

Once Upon A River by Diane Setterfield, and Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen by Dexter Palmer are both great reads.

Happy reading,

Kate