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Résumé
Résumé
A heartbreakingly gorgeous novel based on the true story of two girls who fall secretly, deeply, and dangerously in love at boarding school in 19th century York, from the bestselling author of Room and The Wonder .
Drawing on years of investigation and Anne Lister's five-million-word secret journal, Learned by Heart is the long-buried love story of Eliza Raine, an orphan heiress banished from India to England at age six, and Anne Lister, a brilliant, troublesome tomboy, who meet at the Manor School for young ladies in York in 1805 when they are both fourteen.
Emotionally intense, psychologically compelling, and deeply researched, Learned by Heart is an extraordinary work of fiction by one of the world's greatest storytellers. Full of passion and heartbreak, the tangled lives of Anne Lister and Eliza Raine form a love story for the ages.
Critiques (5)
Critique du Publishers Weekly
Donoghue (Haven) returns with an impressive story inspired by Eliza Raine, who was written about in Anne Lister's coded diaries about her lesbian love life. At the beginning of the 19th century at a chilly boarding school in Yorkshire, 14-year-olds Eliza and Anne share a garret near the servants' quarters. Born in India to an Indian mother and an East India Company man, Eliza has been sent to England for "finishing" by her father, who is subsequently lost at sea, leaving her and her sister with a small fortune and in the care of guardians. Anne is vibrant, defiant, and smarter than most of the other "Middles" in their class, and she soon draws the observant but reserved Eliza into her orbit. In Anne's presence, Eliza grows in confidence and the two become inseparable as their friendship turns sexual. The bonds that form between the two girls ultimately lead to Eliza's tragic undoing, and she ends up in a mental asylum. Donoghue makes good use of her choice to delve into Eliza's perspective rather than Anne's by exploring the steep cost for her protagonist of tethering herself to a rebel. This melancholic love story is imbued with deep feeling and generosity toward its characters. (Aug.)
Critique du Guardian
Across her prolific 30-year career Emma Donoghue's novels have ranged widely both in time (back as far as AD600) and place (from Ireland and the French Riviera to Canada and the west coast of the US), but perhaps the most striking feature of her work remains the devastating intensity she brings to bear on constrained, often profoundly claustrophobic spaces. From the scrap of island in Haven to the maternity ward in The Pull of the Stars, from Anna's cramped bedroom in The Wonder to the harrowing 11ft-by-11ft confinement of Jack and Ma in her multimillion bestseller Room, Donoghue is a master of the microcosm. The rules and privations of a small girls' boarding school in the early 19th century must have proved an irresistible lure. In Learned By Heart, Donoghue explores the real-life relationship between Anne Lister and Eliza Raine when the two girls were pupils at Miss Hargrave's Manor school in York. Lister, best known to modern audiences as the inspiration for Sally Wainwright's BBC drama Gentleman Jack, was a landowner, a businesswoman, a prolific diarist and openly lesbian; in 1834 she exchanged rings with Ann Walker at York's Holy Trinity church in the first recorded lesbian marriage ceremony in British (and possibly world) history. Much less is known about Eliza Raine, who was born in Madras, the illegitimate daughter of an English father and an Indian mother, sent back to England at the age of six and orphaned shortly after. In 1814 Eliza was committed to an asylum where she remained incarcerated for the rest of her life. Scholars have claimed her as the inspiration for Bertha in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. There is no doubt that the two girls were deeply involved. While the first known surviving entry of Lister's diaries was written after she had already left the school, it was prompted by a long visit to the Listers by Eliza. The two girls continued to write passionately to each other for years, Eliza addressing Anne as her "darling husband", until forced by Lister's infidelities to accept that they would not have a future together. While Donoghue's novel chooses as its focus the "less than a twelvemonth" that they spent at school together, the narrative is intercut with letters written 10 years later to Anne from Eliza in the asylum as she reflects, sometimes with anger and bitterness, more often with a terrible longing, on these golden schooldays when "the only lesson I learned, or at least the only lesson I remember, was you". In a piece in this newspaper in 2010 Donoghue named Anne Lister as her hero: in the acknowledgments to Learned By Heart she says Lister "changed my life". But though her novel is written from the perspective of an increasingly besotted Eliza, it is no hagiography. Donoghue's Anne is a mass of complexities and contradictions. Clever and perpetually curious, with a prodigious memory and a daredevil streak, she is also frequently insensitive, a ferocious showoff and a howling snob. Most of all she is, for her time and class, jaw-droppingly outspoken, and it is her candour as much as her charisma that attracts Eliza who, prior to Anne's arrival, has made it her business to remain as invisible as possible. Donoghue is at her very best evoking the mysteries and miracles of first love, the magical discoveries of an intoxicating private world for two. The two girls share an attic room at the school that they nickname the Slope. Under the eaves in this unlikely box-room paradise, Anne slowly and skilfully draws the outsider Eliza from her carefully constructed protective shell and sets her blazingly alight. Sex on the page can be excruciating but Donoghue's prose is beautiful and beautifully controlled. Simply and without a shred of sentimentality, she evokes a relationship that is convincing and exquisitely touching. If she had confined herself to the tiny world of the Slope, Learned by Heart would have been a triumph. A trademark of Donoghue's fiction is her blend of profundity and plot, but in this novel she has allowed research to take the place of action. The book brims with the minutiae of school life, the lessons studied and games played, the outings taken and the many draconian rules and regulations. While these are interesting enough, they do little to keep the pages turning. Just like Eliza, I found myself wishing away the long passages in the classroom or in conversation with their many classmates, impatient for the moment when Eliza and Anne could once again sneak up to the Slope and let the irresistible spark of their attraction reignite the story. This is Donoghue's superpower, after all: to find the universal in the smallest of spaces. Beside that, the outside world - and the world of school in particular - is simply less compelling.
Critique de Kirkus
An ill-at-ease schoolgirl at a 19th-century boarding school finds love with her swashbuckling roommate. In the latest of her fact-based historical novels, Donoghue strikes an unabashedly romantic, dreamlike tone with an opening line deliberately evocative of Rebecca. "Last night I went to the Manor again," Eliza Raine writes to her former lover, Anne Lister, a decade after the two met in 1805 as teenage students at King's Manor in York. Sent from Madras to England at age 6, the product of a "country marriage" between an Indian woman and an East India Company employee, Eliza is painfully aware of how her brown skin and illegitimacy mark her out among her privileged classmates even though her father's death has left her heir to a modest fortune. She does her best to be the perfect student--until Lister arrives and is placed in her garret room. Self-confident, rule-breaking Lister both fascinates and frightens Raine, from her insistence that they call each other by their surnames like schoolboys to her casual disrespect for the teachers. Yet Raine comes to relish the spirit of adventure her new friend has brought into her life, and eventually the two embark on an ecstatic physical relationship. The story of the girls' deepening bond is told in third-person chapters interspersed with Raine's anguished letters to Lister, in which it quickly becomes clear that at age 24 Raine has been confined for some time to an asylum. We don't know why until the very end, but it's clear in the school chapters that her growing sense of self-worth is bound up in her love for Lister and might not survive their parting. Donoghue draws a wonderfully rich portrait of boarding school life, both a mirror of the outside world's social hierarchies and a hothouse of complex interactions among girls striving to become women. As always, her narrative is grounded in sharp observation, strong characters, and nice period detail. She also tenderly evokes passion between two young women, though Raine's perpetual insecurity and timidity eventually become as wearying for the reader as we suspect they may have for Lister. Not quite on the level of Donoghue's very best work but nonetheless a treat for her many fans. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Critique de Booklist
Donoghue (Haven, 2022) pays homage to the nineteenth-century English diarist Anne Lister, known as "the first modern lesbian," who set Donoghue's writing life on course more than two decades ago. At the start of this novel of a forbidden love affair, Eliza Raine is older and basically decaying in an asylum for the mentally ill, hanging on to memories of her treasured girlhood. Donoghue spins back in time to when Eliza and Anne Lister meet and fall in love as boarding school students in York, England, in the early 1800s. A mixed-race orphaned heiress from India worried about her place in English society, Eliza had always colored within the lines. But daredevil Lister urges her to look beyond the straitjacketed life they lead, and their love transforms Eliza even as Lister goes on to have many affairs. The beauty of Donoghue's thoroughly researched novel rooted in Lister's famous diary lies in the ways it explores how unequal the effects of love can be on two souls. "The present is a waiting-room with only one window, facing back, offering a fixed view of the past, like the inerasable lines of a woodcut," Eliza mourns. It's truly a tragedy when your life's best moments are already in the rearview mirror.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Donoghue is always a hot-ticket author, but the origin story for this powerful tale will stir extra interest.
Critique du Library Journal
Inspired by 19th-century diarist Anne Lister's extensive journals, Donoghue's (Haven) latest imagines the blossoming relationship between heiress Eliza Raine and her delightfully bold roommate. Born in India to an East India Company surgeon and his Indian wife, newly orphaned Eliza is shuttled off to the Manor House School in York, living quietly until Anne arrives in 1805. Eliza, whom Lister calls by her surname, Raine, in the tradition of boys' schools of the time, is drawn to the boisterous Lister; they soon fall in love and embark on a gloriously sensual, if short-lived relationship. Shiromi Arserio's graceful narration takes listeners into the heart of this relationship, conveying the girls' wonder as they explore each other's bodies and minds. Arserio's characterizations are outstanding, deftly capturing Lister's no-nonsense directness and exuberant passion, along with Raine's gently masked tenaciousness. Listeners will ache for Raine, who never finds her footing after Lister leaves and is later confined to the Clifton House Asylum. VERDICT An atmospheric, coming-of-age tale for Donoghue's many fans, those interested in Lister's early life, and watchers of the HBO series Gentleman Jack, based on Jill Liddington's Female Fortune and Nature's Domain.--Sarah Hashimoto
