Review: The Quickening, by Rhiannon Ward

Feminist gothic fiction set between the late 19th century and the early 20th century – an era of burgeoning spiritualism and the suffragette movement – that couldn’t be more relevant today.

England, 1925. Louisa Drew lost her husband in the First World War and her six-year-old twin sons in the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. Newly re-married to a war-traumatised husband and seven months pregnant, Louisa is asked by her employer to travel to Clewer Hall in Sussex where she is to photograph the contents of the house for auction.

She learns Clewer Hall was host to an infamous séance in 1896, and that the lady of the house has asked those who gathered back then to come together once more to recreate the evening. When a mysterious child appears on the grounds, Louisa finds herself compelled to investigate and becomes embroiled in the strange happenings of the house. Gradually, she unravels the long-held secrets of the inhabitants and what really happened thirty years before… and discovers her own fate is entwined with that of Clewer Hall’s.

The Rosie Synopsis

Thanks to Alex Layt at Orion for contacting me about this book and sending me a copy for review.

Louisa Drewis commissioned to photograph the collections of the Clewer family and their crumbling pile, Clewer Hall. It’s 1925, the country is still broken and mourning the dead. Louisa has her own grief to deal with, losing her husband, father and brother in the war, then her twin sons to the 1918-1920 Flu Pandemic, remarrying a damaged veteran of the trenches and then losing her mother to cancer. Pregnant with her third child and uncertain about her marriage, Louisa travels to the house, 11 miles from Brighton, because she needs the money for her child, and to regain some of her independence.

Arriving at Clewer Hall, she finds a gloomy, cold house, falling apart from flooding, strange music and a ghost child. The family have lost all their sons to WW1; the mistress of the house, Helene Clewer, clings to medium Ada Watkins, while her husband, Colonel Felix Clewer and daughter, Lily, hope a move to India will help them all recover. In a last ditch attempt to help Helene let go of the house they’ve arranged a repeat of a seance held in 1896 by Ada Watkins. The seance was watched by Arthur Conan Doyle, the noted novelist and spiritualist, and Henry Storey, a journalist from London, with the family’s neighbour Sir Thomas as a sixth at the table. thirty years later, Storey is dead, but his son George has followed him as a journalist, Sir Arthur has a knighthood and has remarried, Sir Thomas is reluctant to get involved but will for his old friend Felix, and Lily, no longer the fresh faced deb is a tired, anxiety ridden spinster.

What follows is a series of events that confuse and terrify Louisa as she takes her photographs and tries to understand what happened in this house.

The Good

I like me a bit of Gothic literature. This has a conflicted, but ultimately brave woman as a lead, a secretive family, an almost derelict house, ghost, a mad lady and a painful past. It draws on the difficult years after the Great War, the changing social conventions and the clash between Victorian and modern values, as well as harking back to the great Victorian fashion for Spiritualism which saw a post-war resurgence as the whole country came to terms with its grief.

Louisa learns something of herself in the ten days she spends in Clewer Hall, and the tension between rational reasons for events and the belief in the supernatural is brought to a head during her rush to escape. What is real and what is a hallucination or putting two and two together to make five? Alice, the cook-housekeeper, calls to Louisa’s rationality, while Ada asks her to accept the supernatural is real.

We also see Louisa making decisions about her future, brought about by events in the house, as she contemplates giving up work and returning to Edwin, her dull, controlling husband, and his overbearing mother Dorothy in Kentish Town. Her comparisons with her present life and her past life, before she remarried, prompted by conversations with George Storey, force her to face her unhappiness in her hasty marriage.

I enjoyed the slow development of the relationship between Louisa and George. The unravelling of the mysteries, of the past and present, is handled well, the peeling back of one clue after another, until the culprit admits their murders and their shocking death brings it all to an end.

I liked to inclusion of the spirit photos and bits and pieces that showed the social changes of the 1920s, the ending of the glory days of the country houses. The older staff ready to retire with no one to replace them because no one wants to go into service, the plethora of houses up for sale, the American nouveau riches buying them up, marriage bars for teachers, and the option for working people to get divorced, at last. It gave the novel a real sense of time and place.

The writing is tight, well-plotted and I was engrossed by the events. The book follows Gothic traditions fairly closely, and I love a good ghost story. I enjoyed the misdirection about Noah and the relationship between Lily and Simon. It kept me guessing right until the end.

The No-So-Good

As the novel was told in the first person, by Louisa, it was impossible to get all the information and she has to overhear things or people drop hints that he puts together. We don’t get anyone else’s perspective, only the things the other characters want her to know. It felt a bit restrictive of the storytelling at times. Relying on Alice for background information felt lazy. and the murderer making their confession then dying is a traditional way to deal with them, but I felt like Louisa and George were more the sort to call the police and then publish the story. I suppose some traditions have to be observed in a Gothic novel or it wouldn’t be a Gothic novel.

The Verdict

I gave this book five stars on GoodReads because I genuinely enjoyed it and was engrossed. It was fabulous ‘gloomy Sunday afternoon’ reading, despite my reservations about how the murderer was treated. I couldn’t put this book down once I got into it and thoroughly recommend it to fans of Gothic ghost stories.