Lily
Rose Tremain
Having read it
★★★☆☆
A story that tells of a young life lived amongst some tenderness but mostly difficulties (and society’s establishments and attitudes to dealing with unwanted children) that scar the protagonist but reveal, in small, life-affirming ways and the goodness of some characters’ ways, that a new potential can be found and lived.
However, it was a little loose in its plot but, given the author’s acknowledgement and thanks at the end of the book about a personal health event, it seems it may well have been a helpful and conducive part of personal exercise for her in rebuilding her life and livelihood from what she had been through.
A good passage
Lily listened and watched their faces. She found her heart to be beating very fast. She saw that she was being offered a beautiful gift, the gift of shelter and sleep, the gift of the silk eiderdown. When she thought about the quiet room upstairs and compared it to her poor basement lodgings in Le Bone Street, she knew in which of these she would rather be. But she also thought that she knew something else: if she came to live in the house of Sam Trench, he would in time release her from the cage of silence she was in and she would begin to tell him everything. She would spill out her terrible wickedness. She might even kneel at his feet – at the feet of Superintendent Sam Trench of the Detective Department of the Metropolitan Police – and there it would be, laid before him in all its horror, and he would listen and raise her up and escort her to the place where she really belonged, not to a quiet room which reminded her of the space where her little cot had been in Nellie’s house, but to a prison cell.