The Doctor's Wife By Mary Elizabeth Braddon : Quietly Revolutionary

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

It's always a pleasure when a book surprises you and this one (first published in 1864) certainly did. The plot at it's most basic is that Isabel Sleaford, the unhappy "Doctor's Wife" of the title has something of a crush on the local squire Roland Lansdell. I won't say anything further for fear of spoiling things for the next person who read it

It's not a spoiler though to say that the book doesn't break the social norms of the day in the way things turn out. But that said it did seem to me quietly revolutionary.

Ms Braddon can certainly write. You assume that the plot will go in one direction and all of a sudden makes a turn and runs with the twist. However the manoeuvres of the plotline did not seem forced as I read it at the time. This uncertainty as to how things turn out made me want to continue swiping the page. Ms Braddon (who I subsequently found out was known as a "sensation novelist" - a fact that surprised me as I will explain later) knows how to keep her readers interested .

Perhaps though more impressive than her skills with a plotline is how she portrays her characters. There are few people in this novel who are "villains" as such. For the most part we learn that Isabel, her husband and even Roland Lansdell are just human. People who emotionally are probably like most of the readers of this book (or even this blog) in that they're not perfect but not evil either. I can't remember last reading a novel of this period where a person's character is more complex than you would initially expect.

As I said before I learnt subsequently that Ms Braddon was a female "sensation novelist" of the time. This surprised me because if there is "a villain" as such it's the romantic fiction of the time. For it is that that powers her view of relationships and the painful lesson for Isabel is that reality is a lot more complex than what these novels picture.

All in all then. A pleasant surprise. An interesting read and I would be interested in seeing another one of her novels in the future.

Until the next time.