Learned By Heart: From the award-winning author of Room
£8.50
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 beautiful historical novel from acclaimed author Emma Donoghue.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Picador (24 Aug. 2023) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| File size | 3373 KB |
| Text-to-Speech | Enabled |
| Screen Reader | Supported |
| Enhanced typesetting | Enabled |
| X-Ray | Not Enabled |
| Word Wise | Enabled |
| Sticky notes | On Kindle Scribe |
| Print length | 340 pages |
by brightraccoonreads
‘Learned by Heart’ is historical/literary fiction by Emma Donoghue. Though at this point, she could write the blurb on the back of a cereal packet and I would still read it. Is there any topic this author cannot do well?
The story follows the school days of the tragic Eliza Raine and her burgeoning relationship with Ann Lister, history’s most famous lesbian. It is believed that Eliza Raine had a hand in developing the Lister code, which took a team of internet code breakers years to decipher from Lister’s diaries. The story is less about the plot and more about the vibes, very character driven as it draws you into the atmospherically close lives of the two girls at the manor house school and their exploration of their sexuality and what it means to be a Victorian woman. I really enjoyed it and was absorbed into their world as Raine bomes more and more obsessed with Ann.
4 stars – it was beautifully written and made me want to visit Shibden Hall and watch Gentleman Jack. I knew nothing really about Ann Lister before and it made me want to know more.
by SusannahB
Emma Donoghue’s ‘Learned by Heart’ is a fictional telling of Anne Lister (of ‘Gentleman Jack’ fame) and Eliza Raine’s love affair which began when the pair were fourteen years old at a York boarding school in 1805 and which ended when Lister began a series of affairs with other women. The story moves between the two girls’ school days and ten years’ later when Raine is in a mental asylum (not a spoiler, we learn this at the beginning of the story) and is writing letters to Lister, letters that she does not know her former lover will ever receive.
Although Anne Lister is the more well-known of the two, Emma Donoghue focuses a little more on Eliza Raine, a half-Indian half-English girl who arrived in England from Bombay at the age of six and, due to her status as the child of a ‘country marriage’ and the colour of her skin, feels somewhat of an outsider at the very English boarding school she has been sent to by her guardian. When Lister arrives part-way through the school year and initially is a bit of a misfit herself, she and Eliza soon become close friends and later lovers. This is the story of their passionate affair and, very briefly, of what happens afterwards.
Emma Donoghue has certainly researched her subject and although I thought she included maybe a little too much of that research in her story at the expense of narrative flow, she set her scene well and on the whole I enjoyed this novel – due mostly, I have to say, to the boarding school setting and the account of the girls’ school day. I should perhaps mention that despite enjoying this novel overall, I didn’t feel as invested in the characters as I would have expected to, most probably because we only see a small part of their lives and we only really learn what happened to Eliza from the Author’s Note at the end of the book. That said, this was still a four star read for me and is now being read by a friend who say she is very much enjoying it.
by Izzielickedabee
Emma Donoghue serves up a fascinating slice of lesbian history in her recreation of the lll-fated love affair between Anne Lister and Eliza Raine. The popularity of the TV drama “Gentlemen Jack” has turned Lister from an obscure, historical figure to a household name, but in her novel Donoghue trains her spotlight on the neglected Raine, Lister’s first love, who’s often been confined to a footnote in Lister’s biography. The possible inspiration for the character of Rochester’s doomed wife Bertha Mason in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Raine was born in India, after an affair or so-called “country marriage” between an English doctor employed by the East India Company and an unknown Indian woman. Sent to England as a young child, Raine was later enrolled in a boarding school in York where she met Lister, a fellow pupil. Biracial, and now orphaned, Donoghue’s portrait of teenage Raine depicts her as someone who’s painfully isolated, hemmed in by constant reminders of her difference, her outsider status as just another of the despised “brown children” fathered by white men working in India. Schoolgirl Raine’s diffident and desperate to fit in, and this makes Lister’s forthright, confident personality a source of fascination. Lister is also an outsider but together they form a bond which makes school bearable, increasingly inseparable, their friendship is slowly transformed by love and growing desire. Donoghue’s dual narrative moves between a meticulous recreation of Raine’s regimented, school days and Raine ten years later, now locked away in the first in a series of asylums where she feverishly writes letters to a long-absent Lister, convinced they might somehow be reunited. Donoghue’s beautifully-researched novel is an unusual variation on a coming-out story and a convincing examination of racism, social hierarchy, and the limits imposed by a society in which middle-class women are expected to take on the costume of stiflingly-conventional femininity. As a narrative it’s not always particularly subtle, and the level of detail shifts between compelling and overwhelming. But Donoghue’s considerable skill as a storyteller and Raine as her choice of subject made this a gripping, moving read.