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Summary
Summary
England, 1255 . What could drive a girl on the cusp of womanhood to lock herself away from the world forever?
Sarah is just seventeen when she chooses to become an anchoress, a holy woman shut away in a cell that measures only seven by nine paces, at the side of the village church. Fleeing the grief of losing a much-loved sister in childbirth as well as pressure to marry the local lord's son, she decides to renounce the world--with all its dangers, desires, and temptations--and commit herself to a life of prayer.
But it soon becomes clear that the thick, unforgiving walls of Sarah's cell cannot protect her as well as she had thought. With the outside world clamoring to get in and the intensity of her isolation driving her toward drastic actions, even madness, her body and soul are still in grave danger. When she starts hearing the voice of the previous anchoress whispering to her from the walls, Sarah finds herself questioning what she thought she knew about the anchorhold, and about the village itself.
With the lyricism of Nicola Griffith's Hild and the vivid historical setting of Hannah Kent's Burial Rites , Robyn Cadwallader's powerful debut novel tells an absorbing story of faith, desire, shame, fear, and the very human need for connection and touch. Compelling, evocative, and haunting, The Anchoress is both quietly heartbreaking and thrillingly unpredictable.
Author Notes
Robyn Cadwallader is an Australian writer based in Canberra, Australia. She taught creative writing and English Literature at university. Her PhD thesis was published as Three Methods for Reading the Thirteenth-Century Seinte Marherete. She gave up teaching to focus on writing. She has published prize-winning short stories and reviews. Her work also includes a book of poetry entitled I Paint Unafraid and a short play entitled Artemisia. Her novel The Anchoress won the Varuna LitLink NSW Byron Bay Unpublished Manuscript Award in 2010.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (7)
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* At 17, Sarah voluntarily enters a small cell to be permanently secluded from medieval English society. By taking the vows of an anchoress, she has dedicated herself to praying for others. Her only contact is to be with her maids, the priest who is her confessor, and the women of the village, who will come to her for intercessions and advice. In this life, Sarah desires safety, simplicity, and a release from the judgments and expectations of the outside world, leaving nothing between herself and God. She soon finds, though, that not even in her tiny chamber can she fully retreat. Dealing with unforeseen trials, fearing temptations of the flesh, and wrestling with heartbreaking memories of losing her sister, she contemplates for the first time the possibility of failure in her new role. Cadwallader's vivid period descriptions set a stunning backdrop for this beautiful first novel as Sarah rejects a larger world that will not allow her to live on her own terms and goes about creating a smaller one that will. Sarah's path will intrigue readers at the crossroads of historical fiction, spirituality, and even feminism as she faces the internal and external pressures on women of the Middle Ages.--Ophoff, Cortney Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE FULL CATASTROPHE: Travels Among the New Greek Ruins, by James Angelos, (Broadway, $16.) To understand Greece's current financial crisis, look to its full history, not just reports of endemic corruption and dysfunction, Angelos argues here. Competing images of Greece - as both a birthplace of Western culture and modern floundering state - have exacerbated tensions between the country and the rest of Europe. THE ARCHITECT'S APPRENTICE, by Elif Shafak. (Penguin, $17.) During the Ottoman Empire, a young boy from India studies under the sultan's chief architect and helps to construct some of the region's most magnificent structures: the Suleimaniye and Selimiye mosques. Shafak's novel captures the era's richly textured social fabric and functions as "a love poem to the cosmopolitan beauty of Istanbul," our reviewer, Christopher Atamian, said here. YOUNG ELIOT: From St. Louis to "The Waste Land," by Robert Crawford. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18.) This biography traces the influences of Eliot's Midwestern upbringing on his writing years after he moved to his adopted home, England. Crawford "has done exceptional spadework in turning up clues that take us deeper into Eliot's symbolic landscapes, often rooted in childhood," David Yezzi wrote here. THE ANCHORESS, by Robyn Cadwallader. (Picador, $16.) In this novel, it's 1255 England and 17-year-old Sarah, fleeing indignities and violence in the secular world, has chosen to cloister herself in a small cell in her village's church. From her room, she learns to balance the outside world's influence with her interior life as she deepens her relationship with God, and wrestles with the fraught relationship between piety and gender. I AM SORRY TO THINK I HAVE RAISED A TIMID SON, by Kent Russell. (Vintage, $16.) Russell's essay collection forms a pointillistic portrait of American masculinity, including dispatches from its extremes - Russell writes about Juggalos, Amish people who love baseball and a snake handler - and his own experience. As an outlier in a military family, Russell is often at odds with his father as they spar over competing ideas of what it means to be a man. THE SUNLIT NIGHT, by Rebecca Dinerstein. (Bloomsbury, $16.) Both Yasha and Frances have fled to the far reaches of an Arctic archipelago: He, a Russian immigrant living in Brighton Beach, came to bury his father, while Frances sought refuge from her family and ex-boyfriend, armed with a desire to paint. The novel follows them as they forge a bond while grappling with their losses. INDEPENDENCE LOST: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution, by Kathleen DuVal. (Random House, $18.) Eight representative historical figures shed light on the American battle for independence on the Gulf Coast. African-Americans, Native Americans, Irish immigrants and Cajuns all contributed to the area's fight, which was the site of some important British defeats.
Bookseller Publisher Review
"A small, dark cell in 13th-century England is the setting for the majority of Robyn Cadwallader's debut novel, which arrives with some anticipation after being sold at auction into multiple territories. Seventeen-year-old Sarah has willingly confined herself to a cell attached to the back of the village church; as an 'anchoress' she is expected to devote her life to God, to be a confessor to the village's women, and to be a living relic to help the village prosper. However, Sarah soon realises that she cannot shut the world out, and nor can she escape her past. The main character's confinement creates a claustrophobic read. This is counteracted, however, by several chapters written from the perspective of Sarah's confessor and scribe Ranaulf. While the plot is slow to unravel, there are some profound and beautifully written passages that give this book literary weight. Cadwallader's portrayal of 13th-century England is not based on true events, but the author has previously written a PhD on women and virginity in this period. The Anchoress is recommended for fans of historical fiction, including books such as Hannah Kent's Burial Rites. Chloe Townson is an avid reader and bookseller at Riverbend Books in Brisbane"
School Library Journal Review
Sarah, a 17-year-old English girl who lives during the 13th century, chooses to become an anchoress at her local church. This means that she is to live forever in a tiny, dank room attached to the church with only three windows and a door nailed shut. A priest receives her weekly confession and offers spiritual advice. Sarah counsels her two maids, who live in an adjacent room, and also advises local villagers. The rest of the time she prays for the welfare of the village and her patron, Sir Thomas, who provides for her care. What events led to an educated young woman becoming a holy woman? And can she possibly stay dedicated to God? While not for every teen, this lovely, spiritual novel is perfect for readers questioning or reaffirming their belief system. Sarah truly believes that becoming an anchoress will keep her from harm, but even a nailed door cannot prevent evil. The church and townsfolk have secrets, and young women during this time period were never safe or free to make their own decisions. There's no romance in this novel, but the layered relationship that Sarah develops with the manuscript creator, Father Ranaulf, is well done and nuanced. Full of searching prayer, saints' tales, mystery, and quiet rebellion, this is a unique literary novel that can be paired with John Boyne's A History of Loneliness (Farrar, 2015). VERDICT Recommended for soul-searching literary teen readers.-Sarah Hill, Lake Land College, Mattoon, IL © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
This is an ambitious debut. The heroine and narrator is a 17-year-old girl living in an English village in 1255, and by the end of the brief first chapter she is locked in the room where she is to remain for the rest of her life. Sarah is an anchoress, a holy woman maintained by the lord of the manor in a small stone hermitage attached to the village church, where she spends her days and nights in prayer for her community. The first impression is not that this is a story to hold a reader's attention for 320 pages. Sarah's enclosed life is more social than one might expect of a medieval anchoress. She has two servants, who bring their own stories and those of the village as well as food and embroidery to pass the time between prayers. Priests from the priory come to hear her confession at least once a week, although a curtain veils her from the gaze of men. Local women and girls visit to request Sarah's advice and prayers, and she sets all these characters in the context of her own memories of village life: the power of the feudal lord; the nastiness, shortness and brutishness of peasant women's lives; the lost pleasures of fine clothes and good food. Especially at the beginning, Sarah remembers her mother's and sister's deaths in childbirth, and later dwells on the landowner, Sir Thomas, and his predatory approaches to her before her incarceration. Nevertheless, this is essentially a novel that takes place inside the head of a woman inside a room. It is one of those modern novels with a historical setting that Hilary Mantel showed us how to write well; Cadwallader is an academic medievalist and I'm sure the historical detail is perfect, but the prose is contemporary and clean without a shadow of medievalism even in direct speech. Sarah's narrative is interspersed with occasional chapters told in the third person from the point of view of Ranaulf, a monk who takes over as her confessor in the course of the book. Ranaulf spends most of his time making books, writing out psalms and saints' lives and watching the work of the illustrator. Sir Thomas employs him to write a life of St Margaret for Sarah, setting up uneasy currents of desire for beauty and worldliness of several kinds. Ranaulf's story provides a slightly wider view of village politics than Sarah's, but perhaps not enough to justify its rather dragging presence in a novel that's already moving slowly. Essentially, don't read this for the plot; Robyn Cadwallader is not Sarah Dunant. The Anchoress, like its heroine, renounces excitement, though there are other pleasures, of a subtle and delicate kind. Sarah is a likable and engagingly complicated narrator, seeming much older than a modern 17-year-old but facing some familiar difficulties in a world where she is perceived primarily as a sexual object and defined, even or especially after incarceration, by her virginity and her beauty. Cadwallader's prose is never startling, but she is good on embodiment and materiality: what it feels like to hear your only door to the outside world hammered closed, to smell leprosy, to eat dry bread when you don't want it and a spiced apple when you do. The small scale of Sarah's world allows an exact literary appreciation of detail, often through sound and smell because Sarah can hardly see out: the sounds of a thatched roof, the smell of rain, the importance assumed by a visiting cat and a nest of birds under the eaves. Cadwallader plays gracefully with medieval ideas about gender, power and writing: if the Bible is the written word of God, who may read it? What might women learn from their exclusion? The classic early-modern poetic comparisons between the room, the womb and tomb are lightly carried and masterfully used at what is probably the gentle climax of the story. Cadwallader flirts with more dramatic kinds of writing, gesturing towards masochism when Sarah tries a little self-flagellation, towards erotica in some of her dreams, towards madness during a period of fasting. There is the suggestion of a ghost. Go on, you think, do it. But this isn't that kind of book. Sarah Moss's most recent book is Bodies of Light (Granta). 320pp, Faber, pounds 14.99 To order The Anchoress for pounds 11.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. - Sarah Moss It is one of those modern novels with a historical setting that Hilary Mantel showed us how to write well; [Robyn Cadwallader] is an academic medievalist and I'm sure the historical detail is perfect, but the prose is contemporary and clean without a shadow of medievalism even in direct speech. Sarah's narrative is interspersed with occasional chapters told in the third person from the point of view of Ranaulf, a monk who takes over as her confessor in the course of the book. Ranaulf spends most of his time making books, writing out psalms and saints' lives and watching the work of the illustrator. Sir Thomas employs him to write a life of St Margaret for Sarah, setting up uneasy currents of desire for beauty and worldliness of several kinds. Ranaulf's story provides a slightly wider view of village politics than Sarah's, but perhaps not enough to justify its rather dragging presence in a novel that's already moving slowly. - Sarah Moss.
Kirkus Review
Quiet, assured debut novel set in medieval England, concerning a young woman's entry into the religious lifeone as tumultuous as anything on the outside. Early on in Australian writer Cadwallader's narrative, we learn that young Sarah, still a teenager, has lost her sister in childbirth: "Emma didn't speak, just looked at me, her eyes fading. Blood dripped, then ran." The elegant understatement of that terrible moment speaks to Cadwallader's approach throughout: the England of the mid-13th century is a place of rupture, oppression, intolerance, and violence outside, but within the tight-holding walls of the Midlands church and the "rough lodging" it offers, little of that outside world can enter. Even so, in time, Sarah, though seeking escape, engages with that worldand she must, for it presses in on all sides. And besides, she's not quite cut out for the isolation. Cadwallader is a poet of loneliness; few writers have captured so completely the essential madness that accompanies hermitage, the grayness and sameness of each and every day: "The stones were faces that came out when my candle was alight, some laughing, some staring, some as sad as me." She is also very good at describing the power relations that inhere in religious hierarchy ("Sister, I'm your confessor and guide. You are to obey me in all things, as your Rule says") without resorting to too-easy anachronisms, though Sarah does have her protofeminist moments. In a time when self-assertion was tantamount to sin, Cadwallader's language and tone seem just right. Readers may wish there were a little more action to move the story along, but this is an appropriately contemplative piece that is kin less to Ellis Peters' Cadfael mysteries than to Mary Sharratt's Illuminations as imaginings of medieval faith and the faithful. Sympathetic, fully realized characters and good use of period details make this a winning work of historical fiction. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In 13th-century England, 17-year-old Sarah seals herself in a tiny cell attached to the village church, having chosen to renounce the outside world and live out her days in prayer as the new anchoress. What motivates a young woman to live such an ascetic and isolated life is slowly disclosed during the course of the novel, and what is revealed brings into focus questions related to gender, sexuality, power, fear, shame, and the nature of faith. VERDICT Careful historical research is blended subtly in this impressive, nuanced debut. While the slow pacing and shift of narration between Sarah and her confessor, Father Ranaulf, might deter some readers, the prose is fluid, lyrical, and accessible. The details on a little-known aspect of medieval monastic life and the tension between Sarah's desire to withdraw from the world and yet remain very much a part of it makes for compelling reading.-Lyndsie Robinson, Milne Lib., SUNY Oneonta © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.