Year of Wonders

When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated village, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of , as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of.
Table of contents

The town opens up once again, but it's not the same. Mompellion, for example, has become a recluse.


  1. Dear Bianca, Yours, Rudyard.
  2. Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation A Study in Anthropology. A Paper Read at the Cincinnati Meet.
  3. Vanoras Fluch (The Curse, Band 1) (German Edition).
  4. Year of Wonders - Wikipedia.
  5. Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks - Reading Guide - leondumoulin.nl.
  6. The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-hatred, and the Jews (Jewish Encounters Series).
  7. See a Problem?.

The one interesting note is that the Bradfords return to town: Bradford is pregnant—but not from her husband. Out of the blue, Mompellion and Anna hook up. We didn't see it coming, either. Things are great at first, but Anna learns that Mompellion withheld sex from Elinor throughout their entire relationship in order to punish her for her past sexual transgressions. This horrifies Anna and completely changes her relationship with the preacher.

In her post-coital confusion, Anna delivers the Bradfords' newborn daughter. She's horrified when they try to kill the baby to cover up their own shame.

Journal of a plague year

Anna has a proposition: Anna heads to Elinor's family estate, but she leaves when she finds out that the Bradfords are trying to frame her and say she stole their money. Could these people be any more terrible? She ends up in Algeria, where she marries a prominent doctor—not for love, but so that she can serve as his medical assistant.

Anna loves her life in this strange place with her two daughters: Aisha, from the Bradfords, and Elinor, from her relationship with Mompellion. If we balanced the time we spent contemplating God, and why He afflicted us, with more thought as to how the Plague spread and poisoned our blood, then we might come nearer to saving our lives.

A Novel of the Plague

While these thoughts were vexing, they brought with them also a chink of light. For if we could be allowed to see the Plague as a thing in Nature merely, we did not have to trouble about some grand celestial design that had to be completed before the disease would abate. We could simply work upon it as a farmer might toil to rid his field of unwanted tare, knowing that when we found the tools and the method and the resolve, we would free ourselves, no matter if we were a village of sinners or a host of saints.

After suffering the death of her suitor and her two children, and despite her own spiritual beliefs and adoration for the rector and his wife, Anna boldly rejects the idea that the pestilence is a call for repentance. And in a time of such turmoil, she shrugs off the social and religious mores that would keep a weaker woman in her place. With the knowledge about herbal remedies that she has gleaned from the village herbalists Mem and Anys Gowdie, and the support and tutelage of her patroness, Elinor Mompellion, Anna emerges more powerful and self-confident than before.

We have agreed that it will do for now.

Geraldine Brooks is the author of two acclaimed works of nonfiction, the bestselling Nine Parts of Desire: In your afterword, you describe chancing upon Eyam and its terrible history while living in England in What about the difficulties of writing a story that blends fiction with historical fact, especially given your journalistic, just-the-facts background?

The written record of what happened in Eyam during the plague year is scant. Apart from three letters by the rector, no narrative account from the year itself actually exists. Therefore, there was no way to write a satisfying nonfiction narrative.

READERS GUIDE

And, since the story had taken root in my imagination, the only way to indulge my impulse to tell it was to take the leap into fiction. The factual basis of the story was actually very helpful to me: The things I decided not to use from the anecdotal accounts passed down over time were those things that would have seemed most like implausible inventions.

For example, a young couple is said to have lived in the church around the plague time, seeking sanctuary from the law. The couple had been married by accident, having drunkenly taken part in a mock wedding at a tavern that was later deemed to have the force of law and sacrament. Unfortunately, the groom was already engaged to another woman. She, enraged, sought his arrest for breach of promise. The couple apparently lived a reasonable life in the church, assisted by sympathetic villagers.

Year of Wonders - Geraldine Brooks - Part 1/8

This story, although reasonably well substantiated, just seemed too odd to weave into my novel. How do you justify your description of the real man? One of the fictional liberties I took with the story was a certain compression of timeframe. The plague was actually in the village for many weeks before the quarantine was agreed upon.

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks | leondumoulin.nl

A deep imaginative engagement with how people are changed by catastrophe. Literary Fiction Historical Fiction Category: Literary Fiction Historical Fiction Audiobooks. Buy the Audiobook Download: Apple Audible downpour eMusic audiobooks. Also by Geraldine Brooks. See all books by Geraldine Brooks.