5/26/2023 0 Comments Wildthorn by jane eagland![]() ![]() ![]() So the novel deals with some pretty serious issues, and it’s not as light as you might imagine or, at least as I imagined when I picked it up wanting a cute, melodramatic romantic thriller. Actually, what I found remarkable -and at the same time depressing, of course-is how certain sexist belief systems, like victim-blaming, are at work in this fictional Victorian universe and are still alive and well today, albeit in different forms. The “isn’t-it-horrible-what-they-did-to-women-back-in-the-day” is a bit heavy-handed and reductive at times, though what bothers me mostly about this is the implication that nowadays women are ‘free’ from sexism. ![]() This historical tale is not just a romance, though that was my favourite part in fact, a larger portion of the book is dedicated to interrogating some of the atrocious Victorian social attitudes to mental illness and gender non-conformity. Jane Eagland, though, manages to make this both believable and exciting in her young adult novel, Wildthorn. A nineteenth-century insane asylum seems hardly an appropriate place for a teenage lesbian romance. ![]()
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