The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

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These are the profound words from sixteen-year-old girl Esme Lennox, a young girl who dared to be different, who dared to think and dream, who dared to want more from being a woman and who wanted to chart her own course in life, not the one her parents have predestined for her and not married to a man of her parents choosing.

What I found begged the question of what would have happened to many of us had we been born into a different time. A time when a man could commit a wife or daughter to an asylum with just a signature from a GP. A time when it was considered a sign of insanity to refuse to cut your hair. Or to be found trying on your mother's clothes. Or to turn down offers of marriage. Or to show reluctance to sit on your relatives' knees. Or to not wash your kitchen floor for a week. Or to feel sad and weary after having given birth. These were all written in asylum records in the early half of the last century.

Imagine doing that for so long that it becomes an art. Imagine a situation in which you might require that of another human being. Imagine that human being is your daughter, your sister, even your patient. The idea tied my stomach in knots. I have not felt this level of wanting to smash into a cell and free someone since reading Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture. They all said, 'Did they let you keep it?'" The nurse sighed. "How could I have explained to them about an outside world where you're allowed to keep your own baby, where no one would even think about taking it away?"

DISCLOSURE: I own my copy of The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, written by Maggie O'Farrell, published by Headline Review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions. It was not long before my heart was broken for Esme Lennox, a precocious , inquisitive, sometimes misbehaving little girl who is not what her parents want her to be. She suffers the cruelty of her mother and father in some scenes that are just so difficult to read. Esme is tied to a chair so she doesn't crawl under the table during dinner. Everyone jumps up and leaves the table ( it wasn’t clear to me

Media Reviews

I think I’ve written three books instead of writing Hamnet,” she jokes, from her living room – she lives in Edinburgh with her husband, the novelist William Sutcliffe, and their three children. Her study is too untidy to do interviews, she says, and I’m guessing too private – she describes herself as a “very secretive” writer. We are talking on the first morning that schools in Scotland are allowed to open, and the house is “weirdly quiet”. As writers, she and Sutcliffe are both used to working from home, but she survived the last year by insisting on a sacrosanct daily minimum: “If I’m able to spend an hour a day with my book, then I can just about stay sane,” she says. The ritualised publicising of a private relationship, the endless speeches given by men on behalf of women.” [weddings] Whereas it may seem unconscionable to a modern reader that Esme would be abandoned by her family in such a way, merely to safeguard their good name, what is more unfathomable is the behaviour of Kitty. At first, the reader is unaware of what exactly Kitty is admitting to. Her connivance in her sister’s fate is drip-fed to us via her demented mind. At the root of Kitty’s betrayal is the resentment she feels towards Esme that Esme’s unconventional behaviour will jeopardize her chances of hooking a husband but, most of all, it is pure, unadulterated jealousy: Kitty is jealous that the boy she is attracted to, Jamie, is smitten with Esme who is indifferent to his charms. Later married to a (presumably) gay man, bereft of her conjugal rites, Kitty is jealous of what she assumes is her sister’s more worldly experience. Wanting a child and to give at least the semblance of a happy married life, Kitty takes Esme’s son and abandons her sister to her fate. O’Farrell flits effortlessly between different strands of the narrative, offering us little glimpses into the lives of two children in 1980s Edinburgh, a pair of sisters in colonial India, a woman who has been in a mental institution for sixty years and counting. Every scene offers something new, a moment of insight we hadn’t anticipated, an innocent encounter that becomes something more sinister, a throwaway comment that has a much more meaningful significance. Esme can unfocus her eyes and unsee the world around. In this quasi-fugue state, she becomes almost invisible herself - two of at least three types of titular vanishing.

Image: A newspaper response to “Silent Minority”: “New deal urged for mentally ill”, though many of the patients weren’t mentally ill when they were committed. ( Source) This story is recounted through several viewpoints, through the stories of Iris, Esme, and Esme’s sister Kitty. Both Esme and Kitty are now elderly, and Kitty, grandmother of Iris, is in a care facility, an Alzheimer’s patient. Esme has just been released into the care of Iris, and Iris is still trying to piece together how this woman she never knew existed until days before has come to be her responsibility, to be in her life. Alex is Iris' step-brother and is in love with Iris; unfortunately he is married to a woman he does not love and wants to leave. He was the child of divorced parents and a father who cheated on his mother and then Iris' mother; as a child Alex loved her home more than his and ended up living with Iris and her mother in school vacation time, hating his father more every day. Alex is a very protective young man and concerned about Esme's presence in the flat although this dissipates after he meets her and they get along easily and well. Alex is the reason Iris cannot commit to another man as she is as in love with him as he is with her. Luke Cecily wrote: "Your opening sentence reminded me of a - very slightly - similar situation in the village I grew up in: there was a nearby institution for people deemed unable to live independent lives, but many of those incarcerated were "fallen women" or with Down's Syndrome. The former were sent in the 1950s and 60s and left there - except for occasional outings to the village and to church. In the 80s, the place was sold, and most were evicted, having been thoroughly institutionalised all their adult lives. The results were mixed..." What Maggie O’Farrell gives us is Esme’s story, which is a sad and infuriating one, and Iris’s story which has at least one sad element of its own. Neither of these women does exactly what people expect of them, and one of them has paid a price beyond belief for being independent and different.

Although she bristles at the term “domestic fiction”, Hamnet is an undeniably domesticated take on the Shakespeare story, with much of the action set not in the Globe or a London tavern, but in the kitchen, bedroom and garden of an Elizabethan Stratford cottage. Conceived as a novel about fathers and sons, as in Hamlet, it ended up a living portrait of a mother and her son. Around this time there were stories circulating about some of these women - they tended to be female, more often than not - who had been put away in their youth for reasons of immorality. They had shown too much interest in boys, or not enough; they had had an affair or even got themselves pregnant. This is a complex and compelling story. It combines a historical exposè of mental health treatment with the modern dilemma of what happens to those people who were confined for the majority of their lives when there was nothing wrong with them other than they were an embarrassment to their families.

We are introduced to Esme and her older sister Kitty who have spent their childhood days in India. Whereas Kitty is always immaculately attired, timid, and obedient to a fault, Esme often loses a glove or ribbon, is restless, free-spirited, out-spoken, and rebellious. Esme is considered a difficult child, disliked by her parents, and often punished. At sixteen, an unfortunate encounter at a party precipitated Esme’s confinement in Cauldstone Asylum. Her pleas to be spared were ignored.But oh, dear readers, the human spirit is far more complicated and intricately designed in the tiny capsule of our infancy to the worned and weathered surface of an aged existence. We stand on the precipice of the new and never touched. We whisper secrets to others for safekeeping and desperately hope that ours find a sacred place to land.