Of Swords and Parasols

Margaret is a 14th century who has the power to heal, and who hears God’s voice. Surprisingly, neither preachy nor “Christianity is the evil.” Anyway the Voice (I can’t recall it ever directly being referred to as God, though there are no doubts on that matter) tells her she should write a book about her life. Except that Margaret can’t write, and so she has to hire someone to write what she dictates. A woman, however, isn’t considered to have anything worth writing about to say, and so she’s repeatedly rejected until she finally finds Brother Gregory, who also doesn’t think she could have anything useful to write about, but could use the money.

What follows is Margaret’s journey through a peasant childhood to a plague survivor to a midwife-being tried for witchcraft at some point along the way-and eventually becoming the wife of a London merchant. Interspersed are scenes of Margaret and Gregory’s growing respect, and his increasing involvement with her family, even as he’s regularly shocked and offended by her story (she enjoys watching him turn purple with rage as she dictates).

While Margaret’s relationship with God is an important aspect of the book, it isn’t a central focus, and is treated appropriately for the period. The central focus is Margaret as a character, her experiences, growth, and the things she does to survive. Riley is sometimes brutal to Margaret, and doesn’t alter the attitudes of men of the period to make them easier to like, even though many do still end up likable. There are also some pretty graphic depictions of childbirth, and various less-than-clean-and-sanitary aspects of the period. I think that Riley tries a little too hard to incorporate as many possible experiences for a woman of the time into one woman’s story, but it works overall. One thing I particularly like about both this an In the Serpent Garden is that, unlike many authors of historical fiction, Riley doesn’t assume that all but a few special women were sitting by and being meekly oppressed, but that many women were, in fact, doing whatever they had to do to get buy in a system designed to oppress them. (As we would view it today.) One thing that the book highlights very well is that part of the reason the majority of (European specifically, in this case) historical women we know about (prior to the last couple hundred years, at least) we know of because of their husbands or fathers is that the men who recorded history didn’t consider them worth writing about, save for a few who simply made too much noise to be ignored.