Learned By Heart

by Emma Donoghue

As I read page after page of beautifully written, cleverly researched, description of Eliza Raine’s 1805 experience of English boarding school as a 14-year-old orphan of Indian descent, shamed for her skin colour and illegitimate status, I started waiting for a plot. There were hints of an impending lesbian relationship and the repercussions that could come from exposure, and curiosity as to why, ten years later, Eliza is in a mental asylum, but still nothing seemed to happen. By the final chapters, I got it. The whole book is a plot. A plot to suppress and mould young women to be wives and baby factories. To teach them Etiquette and Accomplishments, train them to live by a system of Judgement and Consequences, and eradicate any possibility of individuality or free-thinking. It is the school’s job to ensure their charges make good marriages and conforming wives, and when a young woman doesn’t fit the template, no matter how hard she has tried, and there is no one to care for her, she can be locked away in a place that she is powerless to escape—an asylum. Hidden within Donaghue’s clever, humane and humorous writing is a tale so terrifying and sorrowful that it literally made me feel cold. Exquisitely done.