![]() ![]() The French Revolution is the vividly created historical background with accounts of the bliss-to-be-alive days longed for by Lizzie's mother and friends developing as time passes into the fearful Terror and the guillotine. ![]() The birth scene is so detailed and visual that it makes for difficult listening - enough to say that Lizzie is left utterly bereft. Lizzie's adored mother Julia is a sort of Mary Wollstonecraft radical author married to her second husband Augustus, but her life changes when she becomes pregnant twenty years after giving birth to Lizzie. Lizzie Fawkes, the daughter of the woman in the Birdcage Walk cemetery, has married the building speculator John Diner Tredevant, a dynamic visionary with great plans for building prestigious houses above the Avon gorge. This brilliant historical novel opens in 1789 with an un-named man burying a body in woodland on the wild side of the Avon Gorge in Clifton, Bristol - a scene of both menace and beauty - and it is not until the very end of the book that we have the last piece of the jig-saw which makes full sense of it. ![]() ![]() These are the words on a gravestone in Birdcage Walk, the hauntingly beautiful partially ruined cemetery in Bristol which triggers the story of the fictional Lizzie Fawkes that follows. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |