The spaces between: ‘In the Margins’ by Gail Holmes

Australian writer Gail Holmes’ debut novel is inspired by a real woman who lived in seventeenth-century England, a time when bitter Civil Wars transitioned into Puritan religious and social intolerance.

Frances Wolfreston is a rector’s wife and as part of her role assisting her husband in his parish duties, the laws of the time require her to record the names of those who do not attend weekly church service. This sits uneasily with her, especially after her own mother is imprisoned for the crime of praying in the old, Catholic, manner. Frances is torn between her duty to her mother, to her husband and her young sons, to the church and the new government, and to those vulnerable souls in her community who need more care.

She is also a collector and lover of books, something her mother passed on to her, and an unusual pursuit at a time when the literacy rate amongst women was very low.

As I often do when reading a novel based on or inspired by a real person or event, I went straight to the author’s note to see which bits of the story were from the historical record. I was delighted to learn that one of the ways historians have learned about the real Frances was her habit of inscribing her name in her books. Something many of us do today without much thought, but as the author points out, a subtly powerful gesture at a time when married women had almost no property rights of their own.

After years of researching and writing about women in my own family history, I am very attuned to the challenges of ‘finding’ women in historical documents, confined as many were to birth, marriage, and death records, and largely absent elsewhere.

So a novel woven around the life of a real woman who lived over 370 years ago about whom sparse records exist is both a stretch and an invitation – and the author has taken up the latter with enthusiasm and sensitivity.

This is a story about the tragedy of intolerance in all its guises (and let’s not kid outselves it went out with the Puritans). It’s also about the oppression of women in small ways and large – it touches chillingly on the witch trials of the seventeenth century – and the persecution of anyone deemed ‘different’.

But it’s also about the small acts of kindness and even of defiance that can glue families and communities together: the seemingly insignificant things done or words spoken, often by women and sometimes by men, too, that can make a difference in one life or many.

‘We are like the spaces between the words of a book. The words are what people see, what they argue over, fight wars over, swoon over, collect. Yet without the spaces between, there is nothing at all. We are the spaces, Mrs Edwards.’
‘Yet you want to teach all these common children to read those very words.’
‘If you can read the words, you can begin to see the spaces.’
In the Margins pp 273-274

In the Margins was published by Ultimo Press in 2024.
My thanks to the author for a copy to review.