Book Description
Then Came October is a novel about a family scandal, a mystery to Mardie Carew who seeks to discover the truth about her father's death in 1897 and the missing years of her mother's life. She discovers her mother's diary which reveals not only the highly respectable and conventional world of Edith and her parents, but the darker, stranger side of Victorian life - obsessions with spiritualism and the supernatural, religious mania and eroticism.
Edith's diary tells of an intelligent but highly-suggestible young woman, whose life is changed by a series of extraordinary experiences. As a child living in Glastonbury, Edith has visions of King Arthur, as a teenager she is taken to séances and makes contact with the spirit of her dead brother. Then, following a breakdown, she is sent to recuperate with a family living in Pembrokeshire, Wales - a family who have for generations sought a fragment of the True Cross. Their search, by the time Edith joins them, has gathered pace due to the visions of an idiot savant son. The powerful bond that forms between Edith and Crantock, the savant, leads to love but ends in tragedy. In response Edith chooses to make a marriage of convenience that takes her to the isolation of the colonial community in Yokohama; her misery culminates in madness.
From the Publisher
The novel is based on the true case of Edith Carew, who was convicted of the murder of her husband in 1897, and paroled in 1910. The book is a powerful work of imagination in which L E Usher creates a vivid portrait of Edith via diaries that create a provocative and unsettling interior monologue. The novel draws on a huge range of the competing facets of Victorian intellectual, mental and emotional life. Edith outrages her contemporaries, she transgresses in numerous ways, yet remains very much part of her time. The book is deeply researched and even more deeply felt - it is an eloquent evocation of a world that we think we know but which is still wonderfully strange.
This is the first novel in a trilogy the author plans about Victorian women murderers.
About the Author
L E Usher is an Australian novelist who lives in England and France. She is the author of two previous novels Miss and The Sudden Spoon.
