Blurb

Inspired by an infamous real-life case, The Mourning Necklace is the unforgettable feminist historical novel from the Women’s Prize-longlisted author of The Maiden, Kate Foster.

They said I would swing for the crime, and I did . . .

1724. In a tavern just outside Edinburgh, Maggie Dickson’s family drown their sorrows, mourning her death yet relieved she is gone. Shame haunts them. Hanged for the murder of her newborn child, passers-by avert their eyes from her cheap coffin on its rickety cart.

But as her family pray her soul rests in peace, a figure appears at the door.

It is Maggie. She is alive.

Bruised and dazed, Maggie has little time for her family’s questions. All that matters to her is answering this one: will they hang her twice?

Review

Many thanks to the publisher and the lovely Squadpod for providing me with a beautiful finished copy of The Mourning Necklace in exchange for an honest review.

Regular readers of my blog (hi, you two) will know that I am a massive fan of historical fiction, and one of my favourite types of historical novel is when an author takes a real-life story and reimagines it, filling out the often scant details and using the power of imagination to create something that does justice to the idea while making it their own. And that’s exactly what Kate Foster does here: the case of Maggie Dickson, accused of murdering her own baby, sentenced to hang, and somehow surviving the gallows, is the kind of juicy, sensationalist story that is ripe for fiction – but Foster takes the bones of the story and fleshes it out into something far more than the sum of its parts, creating a nuanced, moving novel that deals with some pretty compelling moral issues, some of which are sadly as relevant today as they were in the 1720s.

I loved the way this novel is structured, with sections for Hanging Day, Before the Hang, and After the Hang – it is incredibly satisfying as a reader to start with the day Maggie escapes her fate and then back up to how she got there in the first place, and the final section gives a real sense of resolution. It’s a perfectly constructed book, with a compelling hook and a wonderful narrative drive. Historical fiction can sometimes feel ‘heavy,’ weighed down by research and detail at the expense of plot, but the action takes centre stage here, and the pace is almost thriller-ish. I raced through it, desperate to follow every twist and turn.

Maggie is a great character – she’s by no means perfect, and while we can fully understand her desire to escape her dreary life in Fisherrow, we might flinch at her naivety and her eagerness to run off to London with Spencer. Her family life is complex, and it’s actually quite refreshing to see a sisterly relationship as flawed and difficult as the one between Maggie and Joan – I feel as if this genre often presents the ‘beloved sister’ trope, or if there is an estrangement, it is permanent and not integral to the story. Here, the sisters’ ups and downs are central – they are together at key moments, and there is no easy reconciliation or irreversible ‘split’. This feels very real.

One of the aspects of this story that I found most impactful is Maggie’s ignorance of the laws she will eventually fall foul of – I won’t give too much away, but as the opening statement mentions the crime of ‘Concealment of a Pregnancy,’ it’s clear that this novel is dealing with issues of reproductive rights that are all too relevant today, with the state holding authority over women’s bodies and individuals unsure and terrified as to what constitutes a crime in a fluctuating political environment. The overtones here are dark and menacing, and Foster explores them with subtlety, never overpowering the character-driven elements of the story, but opening it out to wider themes in an intelligent and thought-provoking way.

This is the first novel I’ve read by Kate Foster, but I know my Squadpod pals are big fans of her previous books, and I will definitely be checking out The Maiden and The King’s Witches – this is just the sort of historical fiction I enjoy, and I’m really glad I had the chance to read The Mourning Necklace. I highly recommend it.

The Mourning Necklace by Kate Foster is published by Mantle and is available to purchase here.