Learned By Heart

by Emma Donoghue

Genres: Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Prize.

The heartbreaking story of the love of two women – Anne Lister, the real-life inspiration behind Gentleman Jack, and her first love, Eliza Raine – from the bestselling author of Room and The Wonder.

'Donoghue conjures a whole new world' – The Observer

In 1805, at a boarding school in York, two fourteen-year-old girls first meet.

Eliza Raine, the orphan daughter of an Indian mother, keeps herself apart from the other girls, tired of being picked out for being different. Anne Lister, a gifted troublemaker, is determined to conquer the world, refusing to bow to society’s expectations of what a woman can do.

As they fall in love, the connection they forge will remain with them for the rest of their lives.

Full of passion and heartbreak, evocative and wholly unique, Learned by Heart is the dazzling novel from acclaimed author Emma Donoghue.

Release date: August 29, 2023

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 300

Sample

My dear Lister,

Last night I went to the Manor again.

I open the door here—I don’t delay even to pick up a cape—and step out across the village green. My shoes write inscrutable, fleeting messages on the dewy grass. When I reach the moon-marked road, all I have to do is follow it. In less than a quarter of an hour, at the walls of York, where Bootham Bar has been arching for eight hundred years, here’s that antique hodgepodge, King’s Manor, hiding our school behind its redbrick face.

The great medieval door with its lion and unicorn opens at my touch, and I find myself in the scented courtyard. I turn right to enter the Manor School itself, where three generations of one family have watched over the better-born daughters of the North. I walk invisible from one familiar, ramshackle room to the next. Through the kitchen and pantry, refectory and offices, and up the footworn stone stairs I float. Through the classrooms on the first floor. Into the north wing, past the mistresses’ chambers, and up again, to the second-floor attic. Past Cook’s room, then the one the four maids share, then the box room full of trunks and portmanteaus. The fourth door is the Slope’s, and it springs open to my fingertips.

You’ll understand my wishful fancy; I pay this visit, in fact all these tender nightly visits, in my mind’s eye only. In the flesh, I’ve not passed the lion and unicorn and entered our school in eight years. These days of course I’m prevented, thwarted by circumstances beyond my control. But last year, or in any of the intervening years since I left, although I often passed the lovely old silhouette of King’s Manor, somehow—careless—I never thought to knock on that ancient door. Eliza, I ask myself now, why didn’t you go back while you still could?

You won’t be surprised that I so treasure these old haunts. It was in York that I received my education; where I was stamped like warm wax by a seal, formed once and for all. I know you’ll recall the song—where all the joy and mirth made this town heaven on earth. At the Manor School, I tasted heaven on earth even as I toiled to pack my poor skull with the knowledge and wisdom I was told I’d need for life. The joke is, Lister, the only lesson I learned, or at least the only lesson I remember, was you.

We two were so young—had barely seen the change of fourteen years, as Capulet says of his daughter. Less than a twelvemonth the pair of us spent under our Slope’s slanted ceiling, but there are fleeting times in life, especially in youth, that shine out more strongly than all the rest and will never fade: veins of gold in dull rock. For the rest of my life, I believe, I’ll be transported back in dreams to memory’s private theatre, where our girl selves still move and chat and laugh.

These days I live on words, since my imagination is starved of other stimuli. Not that I keep a diary. The year we turned seventeen, you did your best to teach me that improving habit, but I always found it hard to pluck details from my daily round that seemed worth recording. Without an interested ear inclined towards me, my words dry up; I lack that bottomless spring that bubbles up behind your clever tongue. It strikes me that your own journal-writing has much in common with your other powers—walking, say. Whatever you like, you do with energy and ambition, almost greedily, and with a vigour that impresses us lesser mortals, even if we sometimes find it exhausting. No, only in letters to one sympathetic listener can I open my bosom and speak my pleasures and pains. So I read all day until my eyes are sore, then write to you, though all too hurriedly—two or three pages’ worth, I find, is about as much as I can get out under these conditions—before I’m obliged to lay down my pen.

In the night I send out my mind to roam, and of all the places I’ve lived in my almost quarter century (Madras, Tottenham, Doncaster, Halifax, Bristol), the lodestone to which my restless mind is always drawn, as a compass needle to true north, is York—and in particular to our Manor School. Less than a mile in distance from this house where I sit scribbling, but in time, a yawning gulf: ten years back, to when we were fourteen. And not just any ten years, but that vast stretch between raw girlhood and settled womanhood.

Like some old lady, at twenty-four I find most fascination in retrospect. The memories come back to me with the irresistible force of waves striking a shore. It would be absurd to deny how changed I am; in ways I need not list, I am not what I was when we met. But I recall that Eliza so vividly, I only have to close my eyes to slip into her, under her skin. Under the mossy, leaky roof of King’s Manor, I was quickened to life from the day I first laid eyes on you, Lister. As the old Roman chiselled on our stone, Happy the spirit of this place.

In our Slope I passed my best hours, and sometimes I have to remind myself that they are indeed past. But I tell myself that I’m not dead, not yet. Wilted plants have been known to revive if given just a little water. Could I have you by my side once more, I almost believe

ELIZA’S TRAINED HERSELF to wake at seven, just before the bell.

She sleeps in a garret, too low to allow her to stand up except in the very middle, beside her narrow cot. None of the Manor School’s bedrooms have carpets that might trip the girls or hold dust, but this one is the barest; the floor unwaxed. Eliza rooms by herself, since Jane (two years her elder) refuses to board. Among so many pairs and trios of sisters—two Misses Parker, Peirson, Simpson, and Dobson, three Burtons, and a full five Percivals—Eliza is effectively an only child.

Of course having a room to herself could be considered a privilege. No one else’s noises or smells to impinge on her; no one to break in on her thoughts or disturb her sleep. It might be a mark of the Head’s trust in Eliza’s good conduct. Respect for her fortune too? Perhaps her guardian, Dr. Duffin, even pays Miss Hargrave extra for this privacy; Eliza’s never mustered the courage to ask.

She catches herself in the mirror on the washstand. Of course she’s wondered whether Mrs. Tate—who sees to all housekeeping matters for her sister, the Head—was made nervous by her first glimpse of Eliza and chose to sequester her far from all the other boarders. A young lady of colour, though that common phrase irks Eliza, since everyone’s some colour or other. As little girls in India, the Raines rarely gave the matter much thought. But when they lurched off the King George in Kent, Eliza, at almost seven, felt transformed by the spell of a wicked fairy; so many English stared, pointed, or sneered, as if the sisters’ tint was all they could see.

Years later, Dr. Duffin came all the way south to Tottenham to bring his friend and colleague’s orphans back with him to their father’s county of Yorkshire. Eliza remembers Miss Hargrave assuring Dr. Duffin that first day, “My sister and I see no colour,” which sounded more kindly meant than convincing. Introducing the Raines to some forty pupils at dinner, the Head quoted Moses in her rich, low voice: “The stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself.” Still, surely the sister proprietors feared some of their less enlightened boarders might be loath to live at close quarters with this particular stranger, in case Eliza’s difference somehow rubbed off? That would explain why Mrs. Tate tutted over her list, remarked that the south range was overcrowded—quite true—and led Eliza into the north wing and up to an attic floor occupied only by servants, luggage, and broken furniture.

She reminds herself that it matters very little why she was assigned this room; on the whole she likes it. The one low dormer faces northwest. Eliza dips down now to catch a distorted picture, through its uneven diamonds, of fields stretching away towards Clifton village. Closer, to the left she can just glimpse St. Olave’s, which is the Manor’s own church and a remnant of its ancient abbey, once the richest in the North.

August, with the summer break behind them, and the grey sky’s threatening rain. Eliza steps away, in case any labourer’s at work in the grounds so early, since staring out of the windows while in partial undress earns an indecorum mark, as does allowing oneself to be seen.

She dresses fast, which comes of having had no help since she was six. (At the Tottenham boarding school, Eliza deduced that the rich send their daughters to these establishments to live as if poor; “roughing it” is believed to build character.) She swaps her night shift for a day one and scrubs underneath, using the permitted third of a jugful of water; she dries herself on the limp roller towel. Her short buckram stays hook at the front. The only frock allowed at the Manor is white muslin, which saves the trouble of choosing; she slides her arms into the long sleeves, tugging them down over her shift’s linen ones, then contorts herself to button it up at the back. The green ribbon belt that’s the sign of the Middle Form (ages fourteen and fifteen) sits high up on her ribs. A lace tucker over her neck and chest, its strings knotted behind, and a cotton shawl on top. After tying on her stockings with garters, she steps into her pointed kidskin slippers and laces them up tight enough so they won’t sag over the course of the schoolday.

Pupils are allowed a single flounce at the hem, or a silk shawl instead of cotton, without getting a vanity mark, but Eliza doesn’t risk it. It gives her a secret gratification to confound expectations. Restraint in dress is not a virtue looked for in a little Nabobina, as she heard Betty Foster call her under her breath, that first week. Their classmates seemed disappointed by the Raines’ lack of splendour—no decorated palms, thumb-rings the size of walnuts, ropes of pearls, belled ankles, or gold nose-jewels.

Eliza practises her gleaming smile in the speckled looking glass. The well-mannered call her complexion foreign-looking or tawny; the insolent, swarthy, dusky, dingy, or plain brown. She reminds herself that her skin is clear, her features generally thought pleasing. She pulls her pomaded hair into a tight knot. Its straight black silkiness is inconvenient, since fashion requires some ringlets to frame the face, so she has four twists of paper bouncing on her forehead, which she undoes and unrolls now, fingering out the curls that have dried in place overnight. Eliza pulls a baggy white cap over her head and sets the wide band so her ringlets show just beneath its starched frill, and laces the sidepieces under her chin. A guiding principle of British dress is: make something just so, then tuck it almost out of sight.

She checks all yesterday’s linen is in her laundry bag, because she once earned an inattention mark when a housemaid (the tall, mean one, no doubt) reported a stocking on the floor. To remember all the rules, Eliza finds it simplest to imagine a great eye ever fixed on her.

Downstairs, she hurries outside through the mild morning air to use the necessary, trying not to think about spiders under the seat.

King’s Manor is an irregular quadrangle, of which the School occupies less than half. Where the massive city walls around its grounds have crumbled, in recent centuries they’ve been patched with narrow stonework. Eliza spots a pair of red-belted Seniors pressed against the iron railings at the ruined gatehouse facing Marygate, in conversation with a weedy youth whom one or the other would, if challenged, likely claim as a cousin, therefore a permitted acquaintance.

When Eliza first came to the dilapidated Manor, she found it a labyrinth and, to her mortification, sometimes blundered in on other tenants: a wood-carver, workshops of comb cutters and glove makers, not to mention the huge boar that occupies a small room on the ground floor.

She squeezes into the refectory by the rear door now. She has to veer around Margaret Burn (dark curls) crushing Betty Foster (a porcelain figurine) to her bosom—“I trust you slept well, dearest?”—because those inseparables always perform ecstasies at meeting, like heroines reunited at the end of the fifth act.

At the disgrace table in the back, which has no benches, two blue-belted Juniors and a Senior stand bent over their bowls of gruel, trying not to splash. Mrs. Tate hovers, gaze flickering over the crowd for any infelicity that might disturb the Head. Eliza glides past, as upright as a lily, on the off chance of picking up a deportment merit, but Mrs. Tate turns away to shush a noisy pair of girls, finger to her lips: “Piano!”

A tiny wave from Frances Selby, soft curls of straw-gold fringing her mobcap. Eliza throws her a smile and plants herself in the space Frances has saved on the bench just as Mrs. Tate, behind her sister’s carved chair at the top table, jangles the bell. The last girls swarm in, picking at knots in their tucker strings or shoving hair into their caps. Just as the ringing stops, Betty and Margaret land on the bench on either side of Mercy Smith like a pair of trained doves.

Mercy’s a stickler, disliked not so much for being a charity case as for her evangelical sternness. Eliza thinks it a shame the girl can’t convert some of the merits she earns for accurate memorisation of lessons into more useful coin, such as raspberry acid drops, to buy a little popularity. At school a best pal is as indispensable as a chair or a pen, but somehow Mercy trudges on without one. Though it strikes Eliza that since seven is an odd number, one of the Middles of necessity would have to be left on her own. It reminds her of the game A Trip to Jerusalem—when the fiddler stops, all players grab new seats except one, who’s out.

Frances is telling her the entire contents of her father’s latest letter from Swansfield, their estate in Northumberland. He’s hoping to put up a monument to Peace, to go with the tower and the gothic folly, “the very moment the French surrender.”

That first week in Tottenham, Eliza, only seven, learned what it was to have no friend to shield her. The Londoners didn’t offer any direct insults, only barbed compliments: “What good English you speak, Miss Raine.” Not even the girl from the West Indies would pair up with her.

No one until Frances, years later, here at the Manor. Wealthy, her widowed father’s darling, universally liked, Frances is so innocent of bias that she can’t seem to recognise it in others. Whenever Eliza senses a flicker of an eye, a stiffening of the back, a drawing up of skirts, Frances frowns in distress and says her friend must be mistaken. And since of course Eliza would prefer that to be true, she does her best to believe it.

Miss Lewin is overseeing the Middle Form this breakfast, wig slightly askew so Eliza’s fingers itch to tug it into place; the mistress is all mind, never seeming to care how she looks. The housemaid—the tiny, friendly, hunted-looking one—sets down the jug of water. Eliza fills a glass and tries not to wrinkle her nose.

“Greenish today,” Nan Moorsom mutters. “It’s sure to make me sick.” Always longing to be home in Scarborough, Nan takes pride in the variety of her ailments—sore lips, inflammation of the eyes from weeping, oppression in the head, and that’s only the ones above the neck.

“I assure you, Miss Moorsom, our Ouse water is filtered through the purest charcoal, no matter how it may taste.” Miss Lewin speaks slightly indistinctly, her hand hovering in front of her teeth in case they slip, but with a South of England diction on which Eliza does her best to model her own.

Mulish, Nan dabs one eye. Across the table, Fanny Peirson tries her own water, and makes a tiny grimace in Nan’s direction. Eliza would call Fanny even more of a dimwit than her bosom friend Nan, but a sweet one; all the Seniors make a pet of Fanny, and not just because of her withered arm.

Looking out into the courtyard, Eliza breathes in the traces of honeysuckle and rose. Instead of the sour water, she pours herself a cup of chocolate. “Miss Selby, may I help you to a slice of toast or a roll?” To offer is the only way to ask.

Following the formula, Frances answers, “No thank you, Miss Raine,” and passes the platter. Eliza nods her thanks and takes two slices. Three are allowed, but any pupil who sneaks four will get a greed mark, as well as no bread at the next meal. One slice is thought best, since underfeeding strengthens the female constitution (though Eliza’s never understood how). She spreads butter on one slice and marmalade on the other, then presses them together and takes a small bite, relishing the compound tang. When she grows up and comes into her money, she means to spread marmalade and butter on every slice, and thickly.

The Middles have most of their lessons in a long upstairs room with windows on both sides and an old plaster frieze just under the ceiling. This morning: History, Grammar and Literature, Accounts, and Geography. Nan earns a lesson card by failing to fit Jamaica into the jigsaw puzzle. Finger on the terrestrial globe, Miss Lewin prompts them: “King George the Third’s Empire has spread order, industry, and civilisation four thousand miles west of here to?”

“Rupert’s Land,” a few voices chime. Betty, peering out the window in hopes of red uniforms, is not even pretending to move her lips.

“And ten thousand miles to the southeast,” Miss Lewin goes on, “to?”

Just Mercy this time: “New South Wales.”

Dwelling on these distances gives Eliza vertigo. The world’s so wide; sailing here around the Cape of Good Hope took a year of her childhood.

“The Empire is made up of?”

They chorus, “Great Britain and Ireland, together with His Majesty’s colonies, protectorates, and dominions.”

“It is populated by how many Britons?”

Fewer voices: “Sixteen million.”

Miss Lewin asks, “And their less fortunate brethren?”

It comes to Eliza, like a drip of rain down her back, that the mistress means less white.

Margaret hazards a guess: “Thirty—”

Mercy corrects her, precise as ever: “Forty-four million, madam.” Though the charity girl’s accent is broad York, she always speaks with stiff correctness, avoiding dialect.

Eliza tells herself that none of them are turning to look at their less white classmate. Could she be counted under both headings? No, that would be bad bookkeeping; as the daughter of a Company surgeon from Scarborough, surely she’s a true Briton, no matter her shade?

In the afternoon, masters come in for French, Drawing, Dancing, and Music. (Mercy, who can’t afford Accomplishments, swots in the Manor’s library.) At the end of today, Nan is downcast, because no one else in the Middle Form made an error substantial enough to earn a lesson card, so she can’t get rid of hers. Any girl who hasn’t been able to pass her lesson card on to another offender must memorise an assigned piece for that subject, on pain of earning an additional card; Nan and her friend Fanny are often a task or two in arrears.

Dinner’s at five. Yorkshire puddings (served first, to fill the girls up), giblet soup, mutton, and beans. The three at the disgrace table lap their soup neatly and eye the delights they’re denied. Eliza stood there in her third week; she can’t remember what she’d done, but it was nothing dreadful, just some confusion about the rules. She found disgrace so humiliating—all those eyes on her, in pity or perhaps confirmation of what the girls had heard about Asiatic tendencies to sloth, slyness, or sensuality—that she barely ate for seven days. That was when Eliza resolved to give no one grounds to suspect her. To be known at this school as impeccable.

There’s no teacher at the table this evening, so the Middles may chat if they keep their voices low. Betty praises the local regiment’s new uniforms, and Margaret reports on a terrible breach between two close cronies among the Seniors. Eliza nods wisely as if she already knew the tale but was too discreet to repeat it; she doesn’t care to admit that her sister, Jane, never tells her anything.

There’s Jane’s friend Hetty Marr on her own at one end of a Seniors table, taking more beans; she always seems to be eating. Hetty’s a day girl but generally stays for dinner, whereas Jane dines where she sleeps, at the Duffins’ house on Micklegate. This doesn’t seem to conduce to anyone’s comfort, since Jane constantly provokes the doctor. Eliza finds this baffling; for all his rough edges, Dr. Duffin’s the nearest thing to a father they have left.

Fanny tells the Middles that her big sister has had three teeth pulled and the rest filed smooth so there’ll be nowhere for food to get caught, with the unfortunate result that her whole mouth is now painfully sensitive. Nan tops this with a description of a time a dentist broke off a piece of her jawbone, which brought on an abscess, “and I had to be plugged up with cotton soaked in eau de cologne for a month, and Mama feared for my life!”

Nan likes to keep her mother’s memory alive by mentioning her, Eliza’s noticed—something Frances can hardly do, never having met hers. Fanny, like Eliza, lost hers too young to remember much. That’s four of the seven of them at this table who have dead mothers; it strikes Eliza that motherlessness could be considered the natural state of affairs, at least at this school. And Margaret will never speak of her unknown mother, which comes to much the same thing.

Rain’s starting to spatter the tall windows now. Giving up on the last tough end of mutton, Eliza hides it in her napkin. (Failure to clear the plate earns a mark.) Beside he. . .