Katharine McMahon, The Rose of Sebastopol (Berkeley Books, 2010)
This attractive trade paperback arrived in the mailroom one day quite unexpectedly. I offered to review it because I needed a break from those historical murder mystery series I read so often. I was nearly half way through The Rose of Sebastopol before I realized that I had reviewed an earlier work by this author, The Alchemist's Daughter. Like The Alchemist's Daughter, The Rose of Sebastopol is historical and set in England (at least in part). It has a female protagonist who is also the first-person narrator. A number of real historical persons and events figure into the story, although the main characters are all fictitious.
The Rose of Sebastopol takes place in the mid-Victorian period, with sections alternating between the early 1840s, when the narrator was still a child, and the mid-1850s, when she has matured into a young woman. Mariella Lingwood is an only child, the sheltered and rather prim daughter of a building contractor father (what we might now call a real estate developer) and a mother much involved with charitable works -- in fact throughout this novel she is busy trying to open a home for retired governesses. Mariella seems to spend most of her time, and much of her attention, engaged in fancy hand sewing, a skill she learned from her father's cousin Eppie (whom Mariella refers to as "poor Aunt Eppie").
When Eppie dies, her son Henry Thewell comes to live with the Lingwoods. He is eight years older than Mariella, a very serious young man who later attends medical school and becomes a well-regarded surgeon. Everyone expects that Mariella and Henry will eventually get married and indeed one of the plot dynamics revolves around their engagement, which takes place just before Henry departs to care for British soldiers wounded during the Crimean War.
Indeed, if The Rose of Sebastopol had been written right around this time, this might have been the only plot dynamic. Mariella and Henry would have behaved dutifully, married and had a family after Henry returned from the war. The novel would have been deadly dull by today's standards and no one would read it except doctoral students in British history and literature looking for dissertation topics.
But The Rose of Sebastopol is contemporary, so of course there's a lot more than that going on. First of all, Mariella has a cousin named Rosa Barr, daughter of her mother's older sister Isabella, who is close to close to her in age (Rosa is a year and a half older than Mariella). They first meet in 1844, shortly after Isabella takes her second husband, Sir Matthew Stukeley, a landowner and manufacturer of lead and cotton products. Rosa is by the standards of the time a completely impossible young woman, outspoken, curious, and alarmingly unconventional. Mariella finds her simultaneously fascinating and frightening. Rosa literally falls in love with Mariella. While I would not call it a lesbian relationship, I would say that it's the kind of intense love that young women in their early teens often feel for each other. Some grow out of it, some grow into it.
Rosa has two older stepbrothers, Horatio and Max Stukeley. Horatio, the heir to his father's title, land and other properties, is already too old to be of much interest to the girls. Max, the younger brother, is darkly handsome and about as rebellious and unconventional as Rosa. He skips from school to school, not really settling into any vocation until he joins the cavalry, where finally he seems to find his place in life. Of course that means he's in active service during the Crimean War.
I think this is the first novel I've read in which that particular war provides a significant historical backdrop. I'd never really thought about it much, other than to connect it with the nursing work of Florence Nightingale and the Alfred, Lord Tennyson poem, "The Charge of the Light Brigade," which documented a battle between Russian and British troops that proved disastrous for the latter. One of the many wars that took place in Europe during this period, the Crimean War pitted the British, the French, the Ottoman Turks and the Sardinians against the Russians in a conflict that had more to do with ideology than territory.
Again, a novel written at the time the action took place would have likely avoided making critical remarks about the way the British handled their share of the war. Being a novel written in the present time, The Rose of Sebastopol illustrates both in the comments of characters and in the action that takes place in the Crimea that there was plenty of mismanagement to go around, with the resulting loss of life.
Quite a lot of the 1850s action in The Rose of Sebastopol takes place in the Crimea, amidst the noise and the dirt and the blood and the chaos of a ground war. Max is there fighting, Henry is there treating wounded soldiers, Rosa travels there to fulfill her need to help others by nursing them, Mariella eventually goes there in search of Rosa. Much of the tension in this part of the story concerns the mystery of Rosa's disappearance, which is somehow linked to Henry's illness and subsequent relocation to a small town in Italy to recuperate. Much of the tension in the earlier part of the story concerns Rosa and Mariella's unsuccessful efforts to convince Sir Matthew to improve the living and working conditions of the people who staff his lead plant and populate the nearby village.
But mostly The Rose of Sebastopol is about Mariella's journey of self-discovery. She is far too docile and obedient at the start of the novel to make a very appealing contemporary heroine. Her travels and travails compel her to assume a mantle of courage that makes her resemble her missing cousin more than she quite imagines.
I found The Rose of Sebastopol generally interesting and entertaining, particularly in terms of its detailed portrayal of the Crimean War and the opinions held by various groups of people in Britain about it -- that reminded me of the way different people in the United States viewed the Viet Nam War. In The Rose of Sebastopol, the first-person narrative didn't work as well for me as I would have liked. I think that McMahon might have made this more convincing if she had framed the narrative as a combination of journal entries and letters rather than leaving it without any sort of frame. Also, since so much of the action took place on the Crimean Peninsula, I would have appreciated it if the publisher had included a simple line map of this region with the key place names and battles marked. That would have given me a better sense of distances and relationships among the locations mentioned in the text.
The hard-cover edition of The Rose of Sebastopol initially appeared in March 2009. It is readily available at very low cost from the usual Web-based vendors.
