Helen Dunmore (2017) Birdcage Walk.

How did the French Revolution effect property prices in Bristol? Helen Dunmore likes to capture lost voices. Those that do not make it into history books. Lives lived and largely forgotten. The protagonist fits a familiar pattern. Plucky female. In this case, it’s Lizzie Fawkes. Her mother is a Radical, Julia Elizabeth Fawkes. She is a writer of pamphlets that champion causes such as women’s independence, the overthrow of a system that favours inheritance and the maintenance of the status-quo. A supporter of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man (and Women). In other words, an outsider.

Her polemic is given voice by Augustus Gleeson. Lizzie believes her stepfather is a self-serving man that means well and does well—for himself—in the role he plays.

Lizzie’s life is tied to the mercurial John Diner Tredevant. She is blinded by her desire for him. His desire for her is bound by his belief in what ways a woman should behave and the ways in which she should be subservient to his needs and desires. Lizzie is pulled both ways by her mother’s goodness and her education which shaped who she is and will be.

Diner is a capitalist. He has built himself up by work, work and more work and by driving his men harder than he drives himself. Each time he has built properties for the landed class, he has reinvested in bigger and better prospects. Birdcage Walk is a sure thing. The finest materials with artisans and a row of properties with a view to die for two-hundred feet above the River Anon.

But he must sell his vision. The first row of houses paying for the building material for the second row and so on. Money is tight. The overthrow of the aristocracy in France which began with the storming of the Bastille 1789 washed away Diner’s plans for the longest terrace in Europe. He and Lizzie face ruin.

Dumore’s plots follow a similar pattern. Her protagonist’s mother dies during pregnancy. She leaves a baby. See, for example, Anna’s survival in The Siege is tied to her love for her half-brother, whom he brings up as her own.

Lizzie brings home her half-brother to Diner. He does not want Augustus’s child. He does not want to share his wife. His first wife in her grave. He becomes more controlling as things fall apart. He spies on Lizzie. Wants to isolate her. Controlling behaviour we’re familiar with in contemporary twenty-first-century society. Back then, of course, men did control women. Married men must discipline their wives. A feudal system built around men’s needs.

Lizzie must break free and claim autonomy. She must choose to live her life and not his. She must save the child. House may lie empty and rooms life roofless, but love must prevail and Lizzie’s life reclaimed. Read on.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6