The Low Road
Author: Katharine Quarmby
At first, I worried that this would be a very bleak book. The context and material is grim. Based on a true story, beginning in Norfolk’s Waveney Valley in 1813, it tells the story of a young woman, Hannah Tyrell, whose mother has been imprisoned following the discovery of the dead body of her baby. Hannah then carries a preparation to her, so that her mother is able to die by suicide. She is buried with a stake through her heart.
So far, so awful. But the theme of this impeccably-researched book works around Hannah’s mother’s final words to her: ‘Write down what you cannot say out loud.’ The arc is redemptive, in the end.
Facing rural prejudice, and a very judgemental vicar, Hannah ends up in the Refuge for the Destitute in London, where she will be trained for domestic service. There she eventually meets another girl, Annie Simpkins, and develops a passionate attachment to her. The refuge places its girls as servants, but the middle-class employers to whom she is allocated are not right for Hannah either. The hypocrisy and difficulties of these employers are extremely well described. A victim of circumstances beyond her control, Hannah is stuck and cannot act without breaking her connections to Annie or the refuge. As a result of jealousy and betrayal, she ends up in even more trouble.
Because of the placement itself, and its eventual failure, Hannah is separated from Annie, emotionally and geographically. To survive, she is forced into a very banal crime, and is discovered, for which she is condemned. In the end she, without Annie, is transported to Botany Bay as a convict. Thankfully, after a string of vicious and exploitative men, she might now have the chance to meet a decent one. But what has happened to Annie?
Amid this increasingly-gripping book, Friends will be glad and interested to meet Elizabeth Fry and other Friends as Newgate Prison visitors to Hannah and the other female inmates. Most of the prisoners have been victims of unpleasant men, as was Hannah’s own mother, or a society which prides itself on being Christian, but is anything but. Many of the women are shown ending up with worse fates than Hannah. Their choices are very constrained, and their power and agency is negligible. Fry and the other Friends are lights in the darkness of poverty and imprisonment.
After a slow start, I really ended up enjoying this book. If you like historical settings, you will love it too. The characters and situations are vividly portrayed, and the twists and turns of Hannah’s story, and of how she manages to survive, are very compelling.
A member of Hampstead Meeting, the author is a campaigning journalist who has written about hate crime against disabled people, travellers and Roma people, among other important social issues. On the evidence of this, she is a brilliant fiction writer too.
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