Insight into dangerous liaison
Emma Donoghue is a prolific Irish-Canadian author whose work has won her finalist status in the Man Booker, Commonwealth and Orange literary prizes. The Man Booker was for her novel Room, which was made into a movie of the same name. For this she was nominated for an Academy Award in the best screenplay adaptation category.
Indisputably, Donoghue is a seriously talented writer.
It is pertinent to point out she has also won awards for lesbian fiction.
Learned by Heart is a story of passion shared by school girls in their early teens.
What lifts it from the mainstream is the year is 1805 and Donoghue has based her fiction on fact she drew from the five-million-word coded diaries of real-life Yorkshire woman Anne Lister, whose sapphic relationships were legendary.
Donoghue makes Lister one of Learned by Heart’s two core characters.
The other is Eliza Raine, the mixed-race illegitimate daughter of a British man and Indian woman. She is shipped off to Miss Hargrave’s Manor School for Young Ladies in York. There she and Lister share an attic room reserved for perceived misfits.
Lister is a tomboy with a seemingly endless knowledge of virtually everything. The pair are drawn to each other. Lister is the play maker, Raine becomes her willing bed mate.
Inevitably their illicit union is torn asunder.
Lister is banished; an asylum for the mentally disordered becomes Raine’s home.
Donoghue has achieved a piercing insight into a tangled liaison between young women in an era where same-sex liaisons were considered immoral and unconscionable.