Novel of the week

LEARWIFE by JR Thorp

336pp, Canongate, £14.99, ebook £11.99, audio available ★★

Who was King Lear’s wife? It’s an interesting question, if not a new one: Gordon Bottomley wrote a, now largely forgotten, play in 1917 about the woman who is referred to only a couple of times by Shakespeare.

These days the question has renewed cultural currency – the publishing industry is obsessed with the lives of women “written out” of history and literature, although the implied feminine injustice of this in the case of Mrs Lear must surely be balanced against Shakespeare’s seeming and not unreasonable artistic conviction that a story about a king’s relationship with his daughters would be all the more potent on an imaginative level without the presence of their mother.

All the same, JR Thorp has come up with a striking premise for her debut novel. Lear’s Queen has been banished at Lear’s behest (which makes sense; we know he has a predilection for this sort of thing) long before the start of the play and has spent 15 years in an abbey, her identity concealed, her three daughters forbidden from seeing her.

The abbey is, of course, its own medieval court with its own hierarchies, yet run exclusively by women and, to the outside world, largely invisible. As such it gives Thorp a rich space in which to ruminate on issues of gender and power as Lear’s Queen spends her drifting days negotiating the internal struggles for dominance within the plague-stricken abbey, while besieged on a daily basis by memories of her daughters, her husband’s tyrannical rages and his desperation for a son.

Thorp engages with Shakespeare’s play in so much as she offers an intriguing new lens on Goneril and Regan, women forged very much in the image of their intractable ruthless father rather than their mother. Yet the prose is so excessively poetic, the tone so pungently self-righteous and the actual story so negligible, I fear Thorp has merely consigned Lear’s neglected Queen to another form of oblivion.