This is a peach of a book: deliciously ripe and juicy but with a stone-hard centre. I loved it, and it's gone straight on my books of the year list.
The heroines of Elaine di Rollo's A Proper Education for Girls (first published as The Peachgrowers' Almanac) are twin sisters Lilian and Alice Talbot who live in a vast Victorian mansion with their controlling father and a number of his aged aunts. Lilian has 'disgraced' herself and been banished to India where, married to a dreary missionary, she is caught up in the Mutiny of 1857.
Alice, meanwhile, remains at home helping her father with his "Collection". Mr. Talbot has the acquisitive habits of a William Burrell crossed with John Tradescant the Elder, and his enormous magpie's hoard of items scientific, decorative, quaint and curious, are ranged everywhere about his house. Alice, however, is a young woman of intelligence, open-minded, outspoken, independent of spirit; what future is there for her in this stultifying environment, and what chance of escape?
What transpires is - as one reviewer put it - a "rollicking" adventure, both for Lilian in exile and Alice at home. I loved its humour, its scenes of great comic imagination, its fascinating factual basis. The author has a doctorate in the social history of medicine, and her research has been put to good but careful use here as we learn much about the treatment of women at the hands of the medical profession of the time (hence the 'stone-hard centre' I mentioned above). The book also features Bakewell tart, early photography, Victorian pornography, numbered mice, a mnemonic coat, a home-made volcano and a wonderful, wonderful conservatory (I want it!!).
With a seedy butler called Sluce, Cattermole the odious medic, and Mr. Hunter the Flashman-esque plant-hunter, this highly imaginative novel is part Gothic farce with shades of Gormenghast and Monty Python. I hope I've done it justice (its cover does not, I think) for it is terrific stuff!
