Kim Sherwood
Virago, 2 February 2023
Available as: HB, 506pp, e
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780349015361
I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of A Wild & True Relation via Netgalley, to consider for review.
Kim Sherwood is one of those authors who refuses to be trapped in one genre or another. She's written historical fiction about the Holocaust. She's written James Bond. And here she is telling, with great verve and with a strand of modern relevance, a story of smugglers, Revenue men and seadogs in early 18th century Devon, Queen Anne's time.
But A Wild & True Relation is so much more than that, really it is.
It's the tale of Molly - Orlando - a young girl brought up aboard ship by smugglers as a boy, after her mother is killed in a mysterious scuffle involving notorious 'free trader' Tom West, Revenue man Dick English, and one of West's crew.
Orlando grows up determined to take revenge against English, who he blames for his mother's death. Influenced and schooled by West, he/ she becomes an accomplished sailor, something that would never be allowed a girl or woman, and indeed a perfect smuggler, something only a hair's breadth from being a pirate. But it's a time when the free traders are popular - 'Watch the wall, my darling, when the gentlemen go by' - and West lords it over Devon like a king, any and all manner of sins being forgiven or at least overlooked... for now.
But there's more! A Wild & True Relation may be rooted in stormy 18th century Devon but it grows out into other ages, other places too. Molly's/ Orlando's story is elusive, contradictory - one of the themes of this book, indeed, with nothing sure and certain, facts slippery and events liable to be reimagined - but it comes to the attention of a succession of writers: Mrs Thrale and Doctor Johnson, Daniel Defoe and Celia Fiennes, Charles Dickens, and eventually, Robert Louis Stevenson. We see the story become a touchstone, as characters look for a personal connection with Molly, eventually the 'lady shipwright" of Devonport, as it is reworked into filmscript, travelogue and more.
A common feature of the reworking is the appropriation of women's writing, imagination, life by men, something coolly commented on by a modern voice writing a series of lectures to be given commemorating Virginia Wolf at Girton College, Oxford (Orlando, of course!) I really enjoyed these interpolations. While the story of Orlando/ Molly is (I think!) fictitious, the descriptions given, and judgements made, of how cerated male writers used the woman around them are factual - and pretty scathing. Putting into those hands a narrative of a woman who who did whatever it took not to be so used - neither by the hand of officialdom nor by a romantic rogue - is a great corrective. There is a golden thread running through this book that, come what may, in the end Molly will be heard.
In the strangest sense, that very modern sensibility makes the romantic, salt-splashed narrative of three hundred years ago seem even more immediate, its themes and issues even more alive and present, than if it were just another romance of the sea, of which we have plenty (and I'm not saying that's a bad thing!)
Really, really good, fun to read and with a sharp core - or might I say a blade? - of steel at its heart
For more information about A Wild & True Relation, see the publisher's website here.
