Learwife

by J.R. Thorp, Juliet Stevenson (Narrator)

Inspired by Shakespeare's King Lear, this breathtaking debut novel tells the story of the most famous woman ever written out of literary history.

"I am the queen of two crowns, banished fifteen years, the famed and gilded woman, bad-luck baleful girl, mother of three small animals, now gone. I am fifty-five years old. I am Lear's wife. I am here."

Word has come. Care-bent King Lear is dead, driven mad and betrayed. His three daughters too, broken in battle. But someone has survived: Lear's queen. Exiled to a nunnery years ago, written out of history, her name forgotten. Now she can tell her story.

Though her grief and rage may threaten to crack the earth open, she knows she must seek answers. Why was she sent away in shame and disgrace? What has happened to Kent, her oldest friend and ally? And what will become of her now, in this place of women? To find peace she must reckon with her past and make a terrible choice - one upon which her destiny, and that of the entire abbey, rests.

Giving unforgettable voice to a woman whose absence has been a tantalising mystery, Learwife is a breathtaking novel of loss, renewal and how history bleeds into the present.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Shakespeare, Historical, Retellings, Literary Fiction, Audiobook

Audible Audio

First published November 2, 2021

About the author

J.R. Thorp is a writer, lyricist and librettist. She won the London Short Story Award in 2011 and was shortlisted for the BBC Opening Lines Prize, and has had work published in the Cambridge Literary Review, Manchester Review, antiTHESIS, Wave Composition and elsewhere. She wrote the libretto for the highly acclaimed modern opera Dear Marie Stopes and has had works commissioned by the Arts Council, the Wellcome Trust and St Paul's Cathedral. She was a Clarendon Scholar at Oxford, where she completed her PhD. Born in Australia, she now lives in Cork, Ireland.

Reviews

[Roman Clodia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of course I am unwritten. Of course I am hacked out of the book. It would have been part of the banishment. Lear would have splintered me from his family tree, so that his girls came from his own body, without wombs.

So, a reread of one of my top books of 2021: the first time I was so blown away by the gorgeous lyricism - so bold, visceral and bloody, nothing pretty here - that I wanted to revisit it with a more attentive eye to the way it is in profound and wide dialogue not just with King Lear but also with a history of powerful women. I've seen reviews that acknowledge Eleanor of Aquitaine as a model for the Learwife but there are also intimations of Catherine of Aragon ('I took another man's wife, and look how the world punishes Lear') and Anne Boleyn - both women who failed to provide the requisite royal male heirs, were blamed for it, and suffered. The swift and sudden fall of the Learwife, banished without accusation, is especially reminiscent of the latter, as are the rumours of adultery in a desperate bid to conceive the son the king cannot father.

But more than this, the book reopens the questions posed by Shakespeare's play about the dysfunction of Lear's family: through fragmented memories and hallucinatory revisitings, we learn of the troubled relationships between mother and daughters, and the late conception of Cordelia when her sisters are already married.

We see, too, how the Learwife, banished to a nunnery, becomes arbitor to another female struggle for succession when the leader of the convent dies, refracting the national struggle, already over, between her daughters for Lear's kingdom.

Above all, this makes fine creative capital out of the thematic of 'nothing' that is so prominent in Lear: here it is not as cataclysmically nihilist as the play but does encode images that stretch from death, absence and loss to a connection with Shakespearean slang where 'ring' or O (where zero or the letter O is a schematic for 'nothing', 'no thing') is a crude way of referring to vagina or womb - and the Learwife's womb, both full and emptied of daughters, and unable to hold a son, becomes a defining attribute of her identity.

So rich, so dense, so sophisticated, such gorgeous writing - I fell in love with this book all over again even second time around.
-----------------------------------------------

I am the queen of two crowns, banished fifteen years, the famed and gilded woman, bad-luck baleful girl, mother of three small animals, now gone. I am fifty-five years old. I am Lear's wife. I am here.

This is simply an extraordinary piece of writing. It's the sort of fiction that needs to be experienced rather than read - it appeals, at least in my case, not so much to my head as to something far more visceral. It entrances like a piece of music, a sophisticated fragrance, an abstract poem. I didn't know what was going on at some points of the narrative but that doesn't seem to matter, at least in part, because story or plot isn't the main thrust of the writing.

That said, this is a piece that is anchored in King Lear, though a Christianised Lear where there is a nunnery in which the narrator has dwelled for fifteen years while the events of the play take place beyond her knowledge. There is Kent, and the Fool; there is Lear; perhaps most of all there are the three daughters, all dead now: Goneril, Regan and Cordelia.

In part this touches on some of those perpetual enigmas from the play, but it also uses the motifs of the storm and savagery; of madness; weaves in key lines, Nothing will come of nothing... I will not see their like again; and ends with a kind of peace that is simultaneously survival and death. And at times the voice of the Learwife herself made me think of Plath's equally extraordinary Lady Lazarus.

I'd say this is a bit too long given the focus on experience rather than narrative, but the writing is truly exceptional - one of those books where I finished it and wanted to turn right back to the beginning and start it all over again. I hope to see this one on next year's prize lists.

Many thanks to Canongate for an ARC via NetGalley.

[Marchpane · Rating 4 out of 5]

The world is an O, and is outside and inside, falling through itself.

The events of Shakespeare’s King Lear are largely absent from Learwife, just as Lear’s wife is absent from the play. Rather than a direct retelling, the play and this novel form mutual lacunae, fitting into and around each other. The queen, banished from the court for years, knows that her husband and daughters are dead, but little more.

Learwife is stuffed with lush, gorgeous figurative language, to a degree that is often overpowering. It is the kind of book where you can point a finger at any random sentence and find something breathtaking. That makes reading it from cover to cover, however, effortful—it is so thick with rich, beautiful verbiage that it begins to smother. Between the prose and the cloistered setting—an abbey under quarantine—this is a slow, dense and claustrophobic read. But no less rewarding for that.

It takes a strong voice to carry such elevated prose in a first-person POV. The Learwife is a marvellous creation, imperious and cruel and ultimately, tragic. Her haughty narration is superb, and punctuated with affirmations—a device used frequently enough to betray the doubt and fragility behind them. A selection:

I am Lear’s wife. I am here.
I am sharp as a tooth.
I am bitter as citrus. I curdle all their milkiness.
I am not real, I am bound into a thousand songs, I am four parts legend to one part solid stone.
I am their new green thing, glimmering like a bud.
I am a woman who enjoys the drop of shock onto a face.
I am not a relic in a box, not legendary bone, not yet.
I am a good apothecary, and my scales are true.
I am lack and lack and lack, barely a soul at all.
I am made into a hive. I am hum and broken comb and gratitude.
I am nothing but a queen.

What niggled at me while reading Learwife was the fact that its Lear dies aged fifty. Why a young Lear? I am all for reinterpretation but I could not work out how it added anything to this story to have him so young. In fact, while he is said to be fifty, the way he is written—‘old and careworn’—make him seem like a much older man. Meanwhile it alters the novel’s catalysing event: dividing his kingdom between his daughters seems an even madder thing to do… none of this is explained nor does it really affect any part of the queen’s story. I think of King Lear as a tragedy of senescence so this choice just seemed odd to me, and distracting.

Despite this nagging question, Learwife is a very fine novel, one of division, and gaps and absences (‘nothing will come of nothing’). Lavish without being pretty, demanding of attention, cruel, tragic, unapologetic. Bitter as citrus. Sharp as a tooth.

[Rachel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Classic literature retold through the eyes of a minor (or in this case, absent) female character is a trend that I am honestly growing a bit weary of, so perhaps some of my frustration with this book is down to the fact that I have read its ilk so many times in recent years. Reclaiming women's voices in fiction is an exercise that appeals to me so much in theory, and I've certainly read quite a few standouts in this subgenre, but so often these stories just hit the exact same exact narrative beats, examine the exact same themes which can be summarized, in brief, as: history has not been kind to women, isn't that sad. I mean, yes, of course, but I don't need a novel-length project to tell me what can be summed up in a sentence.

Learwife isn't quite a retelling, as it begins right where King Lear leaves off. I have to say right away that I was never fully on board with this premise: the ending of Lear feels so apocalyptic that extending the story feels fundamentally incompatible with the text in a way that I struggled with. (Also, in case you don't know this about me: hi, my name is Rachel and King Lear is my favorite Shakespeare play and literally one of my favorite pieces of literature of all time and I have read it more times than I can count and I'm afraid that I can't divorce myself from my love of this play when evaluating retellings.) In Learwife, JR Thorp accounts for the conspicuous absence of Lear's wife in the original story by positing that she was banished to an abbey shortly following the birth of Cordelia, the couple's youngest daughter. Learwife begins with Lear's wife receiving the news of Lear and her children's death—and then the novel just spins its wheels for several hundred pages, with Lear's wife at the abbey, considering visiting the place where Lear and her daughters died, but instead navigating nunnery politics while treating the reader to the odd flashback to her life at court.

The thing about Learwife that I struggled so much with was the fact that it didn't engage with the original story in any kind of worthwhile way. The mystery of why Lear's wife was banished is a lukewarm attempt at holding the reader's interest; the reveal is not only boring, but I also think it crumbles under a single ounce of scrutiny if you hold it up next to King Lear—it just isn't compatible with events and characters in a way that I think Thorp intends for it to be. But even if she didn't: for a novel which proposes to answer the age-old question of what happened to Lear's wife, I guess I was just hoping for that answer to be something that could realistically supplement the original play. A few quotes from Shakespeare are scattered throughout Learwife, like the following—I honestly just found the result a bit corny and try-hard:

Is that my name? I seem to lose it. I reach for it sometimes and there is nothing. Hands empty; hands full of water, of girls' hair. I smile. Well, it does not matter. Nothing will come of nothing.

I wish I felt like this was achieving something, but it honestly just leaves me with the impression that Thorp is sitting there patting herself on the back for shoehorning one of Lear's most recognizable lines in there. Nothing in this book does any work to augment or enrich the original play's events or themes.

But even putting that aside, even just attempting to evaluate this on its own merits and not contrast it to Shakespeare, I guess I just don't understand what the point of this book was. It's repetitious and thematically anemic; the abbey scenes are dull and the flashbacks of court are silly anecdotes that do nothing to craft a novel that stands on its own. This whole book feels like it serves no purpose except to construct the identity of a woman who remains elusive even after reading hundreds of pages of her stream-of-consciousness narration.

Also, a brief detour: in this book, Learwife had had a first husband, named Michael, of all things, and I just found that so silly and incongruous that it's worth mentioning. Also, the name Michael, as I understand it, has been used in England since the twelfth century; the legend of Lear, or Leir, would have taken place around the eighth century BCE. A friend did my homework for me and listened to a podcast with Thorp where she talked about deliberately transposing the play's setting to follow the advent of Christianity, as she was particularly interested in the religious tension in medieval England; a theme that I didn't think was given enough weight here to justify the change in setting. And speaking of changes: Lear is canonically eighty; here she makes him much younger, around fifty, a choice that chafes with the original text and doesn't really give the reader anything new to chew on.

Perhaps if I loved King Lear less I could have loved Learwife more, but I also found the prose style overwrought and tedious so at the end of the day I don't think I was ever going to get on with this book. It seems to have been mostly well-received (Jane Smiley, the author of my favorite King Lear retelling, gave it a mostly favorable review; and just anecdotally, none of my Goodreads friends has given this under a 4-star rating) so I'm not sure that I can in good conscience tell you to avoid if it appeals to you, but wow, literally nothing about this book worked for me. It didn't prompt me to think about the original play in a new way and it didn't give me enough to enjoy it as a story in its own right and I'm mostly just annoyed that I wasted my time with it.

[lark benobi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm grateful for this book. Thorp created an extraordinary force of nature in her portrayal of Lear's wife. The novel made vivid colors come in my brain. It was such a pleasure to read. All of the characters from the play stepped off of the stage and became human and alive in the memories Lear's widow shares.

The diction is gorgeously elevated. I loved the alliterative, musical, erudite, sharp-toothed fury of the voice. It captivated me.

The novel eschews scenes and set pieces for something more fragmentary--it's written in vivid shards of memory, pared down to the single emotion or sense impression.

There's been a fairly consistent and tetchy drumbeat of a complaint in the professional reviews I've read, that the novel should have been shorter, and more structured, and less emotional, and more disciplined. I guess these people would have complained about Lear's final, incredibly redundant speech in the play, too, with all those no's and nevers.

No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
and thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
never, never, never, never, never!

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some parts of the immediate that will not fade. Lust still rises. Brushes the inside of my pelvic bone with its gold tail. The turn of a servant girl with her breast in a tunic; some masculine part, a flower’s pendulum, a horse panting at abbey gates. The scent of crushed parsley, which I rubbed on Lear’s breastbone for bruises. Running hands over the house of his ribs, the long sweet dip above his heart. Unknowing, years ago, I walked past the point where no man would touch me any more.

I know I am clouding at the edges. The past is filling me. But there is still life to be had, here. There is a contest, a prize. I must do as Kent says.

A debut novel – which deserved its place on the influential Observer Best Debut Novelists of the Year feature for 2021 alongside such other successful and impressive books as “Little Scratch”, “Open Water” and “Assembly”; I came to this novel relatively late (3 months post publication) but would not be surprised to revisit it on some prize lists in 2022.

The novel effectively occupies a slightly uneasy intersection between two literary fiction trends/sub-genre but is distinguished by its distinctive voice.

The first literary trend/sub-genre in which the book fits is that of books seeking to give a voice to the dispossessed or banished female voice in classic literature. The author has referenced older books “The Penelopiad” and “The Wide Sargasso Sea” as inspiration but has rightly acknowledged how the novel during writing has come to be part of a new wave of books such as “The Silence of the Girls”. Here the female character written out of literature is King Lear’s wife – relegated to one verse in the original play.

The central conceit here is that (for reasons which become clear to us and her only late in the novel) Lear’s wife (whose name is only revealed even later in the novel) was banished overnight to an abbey where she has lived in virtual isolation (not just from the court and her family but even to her fellow women in the Abbey, for fifteen years. The book opens with her hearing the aftermath of the (to us) familiar play: her husband and daughters all dead in a civil war – she resolving to leave the abbey and find their bodies (only to be stopped – rather as so many plans have been stopped over the last two years – by an infectious disease induced lockdown).

‘I am the queen of two crowns, banished fifteen years, the famed and gilded woman, bad-luck baleful girl, mother of three small animals, now gone. I am fifty-five years old. I am Lear’s wife. I am here’.

The second literary genre is the female author fiction and non-fiction examination of the role of royal females in the Plantagenet and Tudor dynasties bu authors such as Philippa Gregory – the author has referenced Alison Weir and her biography of “Eleanor of Aquitaine” as the initial inspiration for the novel but the multiple references (whether deliberate or just subliminal) to incidents of the life of Catherine of Aragon is clear to the reader.

Where the intersection is a little uneasy is in the temporal and religious setting – mixing up the part Pagan/part Christian world of Lear with a medieval world of abbeys, at the same time as setting the book very clearly in England, leads to a number of oddities – not least a question of what kingdoms King Lear and his wife’s first husband – the saintly ascetic Michael - actually ruled, as well as meaning that the idea of a mixed marriage (between the pagan Lear and his Christian wife) seems very forced.

As I said in my introduction the writing and in particular the Learwife’s voice (the novel is almost entirely told in her thoughts and meditations) is what makes the novel. Her voice is on the one hand lyrical and poetic, but on the other caustic and visceral – and this juxtaposition not only makes for impressive and memorable reading experience but seems to fit her character (the author has very much gone for a Lady Macbeth type Queen stronger than her own husband and very much the driving force behind any ambition he shows) and how her mind has developed first in her fifteen year exile and then with the shock of the news of the loss of her family. She (and her voice) are both other- worldly and worldly-wise and seeing a present which is existing simultaneously with the memories and even ghosts of the past.

However at times the writing can feel too much (page after page of figurative, slightly off-kilter description) and the book itself is I think some way too long. I did feel that the power of the book would have been greater had the book itself been shorter. Natasha Brown has said of her “Assembly” (my book of 2021) that it is as shorts as it is as she did not think readers could spend any longer with the narrator and for slightly different reasons (more due to the narrative style adopted to voice the narrator than the narrator’s character and decisions) I think that should have been true here also. The author herself has said “It’s meant to be a bit mad. The book has a lot of thick dense prose. That’s the sort of book I wanted to write, one where you read two pages, get a few lovely things out of it and then leave. If it’s too much, listen to the audiobook instead. Here the writing really comes alive; it’s easy to have on in the car or somewhere you can listen to a page or two.”

There are some very impressive elements to the novel.

The author shows to us but not the narrator how the way in which they were brought up by their mother has driven the ruthless characters of Regan and Goneril – while Cordelia (free from her mother’s influence due to the latter’s banishment while Cordelia was still a babe) was able to develop without being used to having to earn her favour and so naturally resists her father’s manipulation.

The theme and ideas of “nothingness” and zero are explored brilliantly in a way which draws on but also enhances the play and fits the book’s conception in a meta-fictional way with Lear’s wife as a gap in the play but with her nothingness developed here.

There is however another void in this book – the Queen’s 15 year period of exile – and one that despite the latter explanation as to the reasons for her banishment (and the change in dynamics caused by the death of the Abbess to an infection) is not really satisfactorily explained, either in terms of how she was not dragged back into the dynastic struggle (given that her exile was witnessed by all the servants and so presumably widely known) but more so in terms of how the Queen lived in those years at the abbey – particularly when post the death of her family she suddenly becomes a ringmaster orchestrating the abbey as she once did the court, and playing off two candidates for the new Abbess as she once played off her older daughters.

But overall this is a striking novel.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are but tenne figures that are used in Arithmetick; and of those tenne, one doth signifie nothing, which is made like an O, and is privately called a Cypher.
The Grounde of Artes (first published in 1543)

Ghosts, look at me. I was twice-queen, mother to three daughters child of good birth, keeper of land that holds three good rivers and takes two days to cross. I had retinue, wealth, my pack of sweet bitch-dogs, four bay horses strung with my colours, hawks, thick veils for summer sun, a chatelaine hung till it touched my belly. I was thick with names. All gone. And I am thought to be dead! Perhaps I am. Perhaps Lear, entering the long hall of eternity, stood briefly and stroked his beard straight, as he did secretly at the threshold before he came to my room, early in our marriage. And the girls, turned young again by the grace of God, before light and husbands entered and cracked them — maybe they ran for me.

So, dead and not dead. A feather held between two pages. I am left marooned on this island with nuns instead of peculiar beasts. In all honesty I'd prefer the beasts.
Learwife by J R Thorp

REGAN
I’m glad to see your highness.
LEAR
Regan, I think you are. I know what reason
I have to think so: if thou shouldst not be glad,
I would divorce me from thy mother’s tomb,
Sepulchring an adultress
King Lear, Act 2, Scene 4

Thus to our grief the obsequies performed
Of our too late deceased and dearest queen,
Whose soul I hope, possessed of heavenly joys,
Doth ride in triumph amongst the cherubins;
Let us request your grave advice, my lords,
For the disposing of our princely daughters,
For whom our care is specially employed,
As nature bindeth to advance their states,
In royal marriage with some princely mates:
For wanting now their mother's good advice,
Under whose government they have received
A perfect pattern of a virtuous life:
Left as it were a ship without a stern,
Or silly sheep without a pastor's care:
Although ourselves do dearly tender them,
Yet are we ignorant of their affairs:
For fathers best do know to govern sons;
But daughters' steps the mother's counsel turns.
A son we want for to succeed our crown,
And course of time hath cancelled the date
Of further issue from our withered loins:
One foot already hangeth in the grave,
And age hath made deep furrows in my face:
The world of me, I of the world am weary,
And I would fain resign these earthly cares,
And think upon the welfare of my soul:
Which by no better means may be effected,
Than by resigning up the crown from me,
In equal dowry to my daughters three.
Opening lines of "The True Chronicle History of King Leir, and his three daughters, Gonorill, Ragan, and Cordella"

King Lear's wife receives but an oblique mention in Shakespeare's play, in Act 2 Scene 4, when Lear suggests that Regan's affection for him is only natural, and he would doubt her late mother's fidelity otherwise.

But in the anonymous play on which Shakespeare is believed to have drawn, she is mentioned in the very opening lines of the play, Lear attributing his need to test his daughter's affections to the fact that he has little knowledge of them, since as daughters he left them to their mother's care, who is now no longer alive to provide he and they counsel.

Gordon Bottomley, in his 1913 play King Lear's Wife attempted to fill in the missing history of the Queen, attributing the disintegration of the family and much of the troubled nature of the characters in the play to her death.

But in J R Thorp's Learwife, the Queen is not, in fact, dead but rather banished to a nunnery. The novel begins just after the play ends, with her learning of the death of Lear and all three of their daughters:

The word has come now that he is dead, and the girls. And that it is finished.
...
I am the queen of two crowns, banished fifteen years, the famed and gilded woman, bad-luck baleful girl, mother of three small animals, now gone. I am fifty-five years old. I am Lear's wife. I am here. History has not taken my body, not yet.

The author has acknowledged the inspiration she took from Eleanor of Aquitane: A Life "Exiled to an abbey, married to two very different kings, where can I take this? It seems like an interesting model for what might have happened to this woman."

Her Queen (we,ánd she, learn her birth name towards the novel's end) is indeed twice-married, first at 17 to a pious Christian King, to whom she was engaged as a child, but who later died, and then to the pagan Lear at 25 (he was then 20). After 15 years of marriage, with Cordelia barely a few months old, she was suddenly taken from the palace to the abbey, for an offence of which she professes to be unaware, with, for the next 15 years, no subsequent contact with her family, the outside world or indeed most of the nuns.

On learnings of Lear and her daughters' deaths she plans to leave the Abbey to seek their graves. But pestilence confines her to the grounds (the isolation due to a sickness oddly resonant today, although the novel was completed pre-Covid). When the Abbess herself succumbs, the Queen decides to stage a contest to decide which of two pretenders should assume her position in charge of the Convent, one that perhaps gives us some clue as to where Lear's desire to test the affections of his daughters may have arisen:

Ah, but God knows power and its tenderness, and where to wield and fold! Did He not lay a competition among Cain and Abel for His love that led to a bloodied skull, and push Abraham to the darkest part of himself at his son's throat? (Though perhaps it would have been different, had Isaac been a girl. Daughters being lesser, bringing fewer gifts, in the desert, and generally.) What's holier? And I ask for so little. No smashed brother-brain, no hands dyed with son-blood. Just pledges, small tithings, proof of their desire. Crumbs.

The above may make this sound like a plot-driven historical novel, but it is anything but. Indeed the plausibility of the plot (how the Queen could spend 15 years hidden without even Kent seeming to know where she was? why does she only seem to really ask why she is there after 15 years?) was perhaps a slight weakness, and the significance of the inclusion of the stories relating to the Queen's first husband rather passed me by.

This is instead an intense, psychological study, the Queen analysing others forensically, but also allowing the reader to examine her, particularly as her sanity disintegrates towards the story's end. The novel's prose is wonderfully rich. And the mathematician in me enjoyed the focus on the concept of zero.

4.5 stars and a strong prize contender for 2022.

[Eric Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

How many people have watched Shakespeare's tragedy 'King Lear' and wondered 'But... what happened to Lear's wife?' This is a question author JR Thorp embraced as the subject of her debut novel which follows the perspective of Lear's exiled queen in the time immediately following the end of the play when the insane king and all three of their daughters have died. She's resided in a remote abbey for the past fifteen years where she explains “The abbey is the prison Lear made for me, the bridle so carefully constructed for my face. Forcing down my tongue.” Here she finally gets her say as she desires to depart to finally re-enter the world and the kingdom she's been banished from. We gradually understand the story of her life through fragmented memories and interactions with the nuns, but her thought-process is never straightforward as “in me the past and future are eliding, coiling together, thicker than umbilical cord, made of the selfsame substance”. Her perspective contains both poetic ambiguity and searing precision as her intense and justified bitterness is palpable. The author has created a brilliantly-calibrated voice that gives many insights and keeps the reader wondering whether she herself is mad or if circumstances have driven her to insanity or if she is carefully scheming as she cannily asserts “I have always been the kind to turn brutal luck to a better chance. I lie, and plan.”

Read my full review of Learwife by JR Thorp at LonesomeReader

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am the queen of two crowns, banished fifteen years, the famed and gilded woman, bad-luck baleful girl, mother of three small animals, now gone. I am fifty-five years old. I am Lear’s wife. I am here. History has not taken my body, not yet.

I do love retellings of classic works that focus on the women sidelined in male-centric stories (see: Circe, Lavinia, The Silence of the Girls), and as the story of a queen barely mentioned in Shakespeare’s account, Learwife is a thoroughly satisfying companion piece to the play. As Lear’s banished queen learns of the death of her family and looks back over her life and marriage(s), author J. R. Thorp creates a credible and affecting tale that goes a long way toward explaining the scheming machinations of the daughters Goneril and Regan. Other than weirdly deciding to make frail old King Lear a man of fifty, I loved everything about this plot, and it must be noted that Thorp’s language is lush and poetic — but also a bit stilted and stuttering; this is not a smooth and easy read, but my pleasure wasn’t too too strained by the effort. I would happily read Thorp again.

Dead and dead and dead. Under the crack of this grief I feel myself slipping out into other forms: animal, vegetal, sea-spill foam, winter wind, a boar roaring blue in the dark. Then at least I would fit the tales: story-woman, death’s head, corrupting flesh at the touch. Oh, I know them, every ghost has good ears.

Fifteen years earlier, in the dead of night and without explanation, Lear’s queen was banished to a convent, taking along only what she could quickly pack and one dull-witted maidservant. When a messenger arrives at the Abbey to deliver the news that Lear and his daughters have all died, the queen appears for the first time among the common nuns, assuming she will finally be allowed to leave the grounds in order to attend her family’s funerals. When a pestilence arrives that puts the Abbey under quarantine, the queen accepts that she must stay where she is for now — but as she interacts with the women of the convent for the first time, and is asked to play a decisive role in their lives, she finds herself flooded with memories and visited by ghosts; highly Shakespearean stuff.

I don’t know if it was necessary to her backstory to have the queen married to another young king before Lear — a marriage barely consummated and childless — but I suppose it explains why she would be so worldly and cunning in courtly affairs; able to quickly fashion her twenty-year-old ruffian into a warrior king to be feared. I appreciated the backstory of her young childhood (with an icy mother who sent her to a convent to be raised) that made the queen aspire to be a more hands-on mother herself; and I appreciated even moreso how the queen’s well-intended interventions turned her daughters into nemeses.

Thorp’s language is gorgeous; perhaps distractingly so. Lovely turns of phrase may be picked out on nearly every page, but I was always aware of the artistry (which is a complaint, even while enjoying it). In particular, I couldn’t help but notice how many things Thorp described as “green”: “green fingers of sky”, “green waves that baffled the breeze”, “irritable, that green womanish emotion”. In a climactic scene, over the course of one page, Thorp writes: “I appeal to Jesus on His statue above the altar, but His green mouth remains pale, unspeaking…the ghastly green fire that comes of burning wet things…we can hear them before we see them, screams in the green dark,” and it was undeniably distracting to me.

Pleasure. Queens live lives entirely made of pleasure, a girl said in my childhood convent. As if power were never discomfiting, as if luxury were always simple. And yet I had luck: it laid its pollen on my skull; I was a blessed woman. I had my children and none died in the cradle. I had two husbands and I lived past their span. I was imprisoned and frequently thwarted but still there is this, the golden cake, the beginning rain.

There is some tension in the plot (as we hope to learn why the queen had been banished and to see what she will do next), but this is primarily a narrative of memory; of putting the queen back into the known events of King Lear, and a mighty presence she was. I loved this.

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the third of the books I read thanks to the Mookse group's best of 2021 poll, and is another which I don't feel entirely qualified to review, as my memory of King Lear is rather superficial.

Thorp's narrator is Lear's forgotten wife and mother of the three daughters, who has been confined to a convent throughout her fifteen years of exile. This is a bold narrative choice, and for the most part it works, though I did find my attention wandering rather too often during the more reflective first half. At the start of the book she hears of the deaths of her husband and her three daughters and plans to leave the convent and find their graves, but she is thwarted and forced to spend the winter in the convent.

In the second half the narrative becomes stronger, as the narrator (who is only named in the last few pages) becomes the reluctant holder of the casting vote to decide which of two very different women becomes the next abbess, in a plot that rather cleverly mirrors the original. This is a promising debut novel, and it will be interesting to see what Thorp does next.

[Bookread2day · Rating 5 out of 5]

My review is on my website www.bookread2day.wordpress.com
Learwife, is inspired by Shakespear’s King Lear. The fabulous debut novel tells the story of the most famous woman ever written out of literary history. This novel is so wonderfully written I had many favourite lines while enjoying reading this novel.

One of my favourite lines from book one,

Forgive me, my King, but if you die, would you not like your subjects to have a word for your absence? There is no King. Not a space, or a gap in the ledger. We must acknowledge loss and account for it safety, otherwise-

One of my favourite lines in book two.

The fever has flattened the softness of her lips, it’s sweet curve. Flakes of skin, white as chalk. And they have not done her hair. It is parted as in the sickness, down the middle, and laid under its shroud-scarf. A tendril shows over her shoulder. In the light it’s darkness still looks wet, ringed with salted sweat.

I loved reading how the storm brewing was written.

Harmless! Thunder and lightning, it’s terrible. My girls would never be a immodest.

When the cook and I leave the hall the weather has changed and the sky is suddenly dark despite the time of day. She is caught in it, the coming storm, her body thrown almost to the ground by the wind.

In the night the storm cracks open. The wind is vast, it hauls against the abbey. To be caught between such forces. It pushes my tower, forces it to maintain its thickness.

I see, and do not see. The lightning is falling, like Lily-petals. Daughters, you are poor compasses, you fail the point! Give me your hands.

But, of course, they are vanished into thinness. My daughters.unless at the finish.

[Alexis Hall]

Source of book: NetGalley (thank you)
Relevant disclaimers: None
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.

This is one of those “I wish I’d liked it more than I did books” but the fact I personally didn’t wholly click with it doesn’t take away from what an impressive piece of work it is. As the title suggests, Learwife—set after the events of the play i.e. absolutely everyone is dead—is told from the perspective of King Lear’s wife, who has been banished to a nunnery for some fifteen years.

If the book teaches us anything, it’s that we shouldn’t pack royalty off to nunneries: they just fuck shit up.

But, anyway, Learwife drifts in a self-consciously untethered way through the memories of the (mostly) unnamed protagonist and her deeply constrained present—she’s essentially a prisoner, cast aside by her paranoid husband for some crime she’s unaware of committing. Though, I mean, given what Goneril and Reagan are like in the play … it’s not wholly impossible to imagine what exactly went down.

The book, for me, was infinitely more engaging and propulsive in its second half: essentially, once we’d gone full Lear, complete with nunnery power games, the blinding of faithful retainers, and swooping, literary madness. The first half is pretty slow, but that feels a point-missing complaint to make about a woman stuck in a nunnery. One of the themes of the book, after all, is the limitations placed on women’s lives and the dangers of forcing them to fit those limitations, fighting each other (mother and daughter, nun on … uh other nun) for whatever scraps of power and agency they can scrape from the world. Given this context, I kind of wish there’d been more scenes (memories) of the protagonist and her daughters: given the way they were raised, it’s no wonder they turned out as they did. I confess I always felt kind of vaguely on-side with Goneril and Reagan—I mean, I know they did bad shit and gouged a guy’s eyes out—but look at their dad. And now, look at their mum. Intriguingly, Cordelia is as absent as she is in the play: fragile and abstractly virtuous, a kind of invitation to irrelevance.

The writing here is super rich, almost overwhelmingly so at times—but it’s the kind of book that invites that kind of writing. Once again, by the second half it felt less like it was dragging everything down, and more that it was enhancing the nature of the story. In a weird, I guess, I had a very similar reaction to Learwife as I have to Lear itself: I don’t feel particularly warm towards it, and I fidget my way through the first two acts, but the ending leaves me breathless with aporia as much as catharsis.

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I am the queen of two crowns, banished fifteen years, the famed and gilded woman, bad-luck baleful girl, mother of three small animals, now gone. I am fifty-five years old. I am Lear’s wife. I am here.”

This story is an imagining of the life of King Lear’s wife. She is only briefly mentioned in Shakespeare’s play and is said to be deceased. Learwife brings her vividly to life. King Lear and her three daughters (Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia) are dead. Queen Lear has been exiled to an abbey for the past fifteen years. We eventually discover the reason for her banishment.

We spend the entire book in the queen’s head. We are privy to her thoughts, dreams, memories, feelings, and mental decline. The narrative is stream-of-consciousness, shifting backward and forward in time. We listen to her interactions with the nuns and the abbess. The queen is not a pleasant woman. She is cunning and manipulative, and we begin to understand why the two eldest daughters turned out as they did.

The writing is operatic and evokes a period of long ago – it is not quite Shakespearean but is a modernized version. This writing style is effective in creating the atmosphere of isolation and bitterness. For example: “Holy girls in torchlight, scraped open with fear. Perhaps they think I have tentacles, snake-throat, a black tongue. I would bare my teeth at them; I would be mythic.”

This is a beautiful and creative piece of writing. It is character-driven and slow in developing. It is more about adding to the original play. Themes include loss, grief, power, and the role of women of the time to bear a male heir. Familiarity with Shakespeare’s King Lear is essential to the enjoyment of this novel.

[Rita da Nova]

“Adorei a forma como começa, porque resume muito bem a forma como King Lear termina, mas a partir daí achei várias partes da escrita demasiado aborrecidas e exageradas para parecerem literárias. Também gostei de algumas reflexões sobre o processo de luto, mas por outro lado todo o enredo sobre o exílio de Goneril pareceu-me demasiado aborrecido para que esses pequenos pensamentos fizessem com que a leitura valesse a pena.”

Review completa em: https://ritadanova.blogs.sapo.pt/lear....

[Nadine in California · Rating 5 out of 5]

I suspect that this book might have felt a bit long in print, but I listened to it on audio in 30 minute chunks during dog walks, and it was perfect in every way. The diction is spot on - it feels like a natural companion piece to the play with language that complements rather than apes the original. Juliet Stevenson brilliantly brings the title character to life in all her Machiavellian glory. Even the title is perfect - calling this woman 'Lear's wife' is far too cramped for such a huge personality, and since she refuses to divulge her real name, Learwife is the best choice - it makes her sound deservedly mythic, like Grendl's nameless mother. The book is written as the ruminations of a fascinating mind, a woman who is more than a match for both of her husbands - as well as every other character she encounters in her long life.

[Fatima's Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.75 stars 🌟

Wow wow...Learwife was nothing short of a tour de force. I've got so much admiration for debut author Thorp for creating this magnificent piece of fiction. To create a character out of thin air, the character that wasn't even present in the original Shakespeare play .
The book starts with the news of Lear's death along with her daughters and that's when Learwife rises to the fore. The writing is exquisite, the scene setting is exceptional, the emotions are electric. But most of all it's the character's VOICE !! It's a force of nature, dripping with power, magnanimity, blatant arrogance and drama.
It's not a plot based book. Read it just for the brilliance of the writing and the indomitable LEARWIFE!!!

[Fraser Simons · Rating 4 out of 5]

The prose work and voice crafted is just exquisite here. If only the plot beats were slightly more interesting. I had no trouble believing, after watching a performance while reading King Lear right before taking this on, that the Queen would be banished and forgotten for 15 years to an abbey. And I was even further primed since reading Matrix by Groff last year, in which a queen is banished to a similar abbey. Probably the only book I could correlate to this and it seems inspired by the real life figure, near as I can tell.

This is, plot wise, a very simple and quiet story of our banished queen reduced, hearing the news of what occurred in King Lear, and wishing to leave the abbey to… to what? Even she doesn’t seem to know. Perhaps weep, bury them properly, look upon them; who knows. But her efforts are constantly stymied and with each section of the book a new sort of arch of tribulation begins. It is also kind of a duel timeline novel, I’d say. She routinely digresses into the past during her stream-of-consciousness, in which dialogue is italicized and all else is purely in her head. An inversion I quite liked and found effective.

In this quiet life we expound the characters of King Lear greatly. And we also find it’s beating heart: a mother. A cruel one, to be sure, sometimes. But where King Lear had plenty passion, I actually don’t think it had heart. I know I didn’t care about a single character in the play. It’s pleasures come from elsewhere. But more pleasure is found here. The whit and crack of the whip that are this woman’s prose is phenomenal and far excel what’s found on the page for King Lear, as far as I’m concerned. It justifies its existence in unearthing the dismissed and growing in plentitude what the play needed to connect more fully.

The issue is that the actual story beats in the abbey are a little bit too boring. This swings the pendulum from the melodrama all the way to verisimilitude that, while brilliant rendered and always flowing from the brain, also drag interest a little bit behind it at all times. Even the height of drama near the end is so pedestrian it felt a bit perfunctory. It does fit the story. No doubt. It’s just that if it were truncated I don’t think it would have missed anything, and probably would not have overstayed it’s welcome. Which, it really didn’t go that far. It was never a chore to be sunk into the prose. It just couldn’t have hurt if those nuns got up to some more shit…

[Cathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I could immediately see why Learwife captured so much attention upon its publication, including being longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, because the writing is extraordinarily lush, imaginative and poetic in nature. As a result, it requires some concentration; it is definitely not a book to rush through, rather to immerse yourself in. For me that meant reading it rather slowly, a couple of chapters at a time. In fact, the author has encouraged readers to ‘give into the slowness a little’. There is a plot but it builds slowly and the book is more about the reader gradually discovering the woman who was Lear’s queen and her own discovery of why she has been banished and confined within the abbey. ‘My crime, we call it, my vice; the unknown offence that led to my sentence, here.’

A question I asked myself early on was whether it was necessary to be familiar with Shakespeare’s King Lear to appreciate, or even understand, the book. Although I know the vague outlines of the play I can’t really say I recall much about the part played by Lear’s wife, despite the publishers describing her as ‘the most famous woman ever written out of literary history’. Actually, hers is more a ‘non-part’. As the book commences with news of events at the end of the play, I came to the conclusion the answer to my question was no, it doesn’t matter as just about all of the events Lear’s queen gradually reveals to us – both past and present – derive from the author’s imagination.

The book’s first person narrator is never named; all we know is that she was Lear’s wife and his queen. ‘Nobody has called my name to me, not for fifteen years; perhaps I have none.’  Her identity is completely tied up in her status as the wife of a king. ‘Even unnamed I am queen, still.’  For the first part of the book, as well as being confined within the walls of the abbey, she is also unseen by the nuns who reside there, veiled when in public, viewing the religious services through a screen.

Having learned of the death of Lear and her three daughters, the queen becomes obsessed with the desire to escaping from the abbey to tend their graves. Despite her preparations, obstacles are continually placed in her path: a harsh winter, an outbreak of sickness that sees the abbey quarantined from the outside world, gentle persuasion that turns into outright refusal.

The abbey becomes her kingdom, as it were, and we are constantly reminded of her ability to exercise power over others, whether that’s through revealing the story of her life in tantalising snippets to nuns starved of other forms of entertainment, gaining influence with the Abbess or later being given a role in the choice of the Abbess’s successor. When it comes to the latter there is just as much intrigue and jostling for favour as in any royal court and we witness the queen embracing the opportunity to wield her power and use the wiles she learned there, not least the often unseen power of women. ‘Men always think they are the architects of women’s actions, when we can slip under their demands and flee, away.’

As the book progresses we see the queen’s power and status within the abbey gradually wane, along with her grip on reality, echoing Lear’s descent into madness. Increasingly she lives in the past – ‘I am profuse with past selves’ – haunted by visions of the dead. ‘The ghosts whisper. One could listen to them sing all night… Things are loose, are unstitching.’

Although it’s not my favourite of the books longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize (that was The Fortune Men), there’s no doubt Learwife is a remarkable book. In the author’s own words, it contains ‘threads of love and power and hate, threads of motherhood and friendship and violence’.

[Graham Dauncey · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF after 25%. This was just a diarrhea of words vomited up on a page. I found it utterly impenetrable. The whole thing meanders pointlessly without a real semblance of purpose. I get the concept - a retelling of a classic from the viewpoint of an absent (female) character. But this does not really do that. It’s setting after the end of the a pretty apocalyptic play means it doesn’t really have any retelling to do and what plot it could have generated it doesn’t even attempt instead favouring an overly flowery style that screams pretentiousness without even attempting to explore the potential ideas it promises. The stuff it does add feel contrived. A first husband (named Michael of all things)? Banishment to an abbey without any real explanation as to why?

The antithesis of what I want in a book. I’m sure there are people who love this type of meandering explorations of descriptive prose, but i am not one. I just can’t get behind the lack of purpose behind it, the lack of plot.

[Leap through the pages Coffee and Commentary · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I am the queen of two crowns; banished fifteen years, the famed and gilded woman, bad-luck baleful girl, mother of three small animals, now gone. I am fifty-five years old. I am Lear's wife. I am here. History has not taken my body, not yet."
👑🩸🗡️
A powerful retelling of one of Shakespeare's most fascinating and underrepresented characters. As Lear's queen reflects on the death of her husband and children, as well as her place in the narrative, an intimate portrait of motherhood, ambition, power, and rage blends with vignettes of grief. This novel gives a voice to the suppressed, unnamed queen who has haunted readers for centuries.

[Jan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shakespeare tells us nothing about the wife of King Lear. JR Thorp fills the gap with this beautifully written and deeply imagined novel that gives this woman voice, starting after she learns of the deaths of Lear and their three daughters. The result is both a meditation on grief and a fascinating creation of a powerful, still psychologically complex queen at age 55 reflecting on her life and the people in it. The audiobook is superbly performed by Juliet Stephenson.

[Maisie (the literary faery) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spoiler-Free Review

King Lear’s Wife, the Queen, was banished to an abbey many years ago. At the novel’s commencement, word has just reached her that her husband, Lear, and three daughters, Goneril, Regan and Cordelia, are dead. Ageing and forgotten, the Queen is virtually powerless. But her pain and fury at the loss of her family forces her to seek answers, and finally tell her story.

'King Lear' is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays, so I was incredibly excited when I heard about J. R. Thorpe’s retelling. Not only does Thorpe cast a brilliant light on a woman who was entirely written out of the original text, but she also succeeds in crafting her own unique tale of power, motherhood, and loss.

Thorpe’s protagonist is cruel and unsympathetic. We see in flashbacks how she mistreated and manipulated her children, which to my surprise had me pitying Goneril and Regan, two of the primary villains of 'King Lear'. Although I was put off by her at first, as I read on, I grew to respect how Thorpe had not shied away from showing the very ugly sides to her character. Yes, she is cruel and cold-hearted, but she is what a woman in this period had to be if they wanted to maintain whatever power they had. Thorpe also uses her characterisation of the Queen to show how Goneril and Regan came to be who they were, and I loved seeing this play out throughout the text.

Lear’s wife doesn’t stand alone as a brilliant character in this novel, however, as Thorpe crafts unforgettable characters with not only the young King Lear, Goneril and Regan that we see in flashbacks but also the nuns at the abbey. Thorpe expertly expands this story outside of the Queens tale and creates an engaging backdrop of intrigue and power play within the abbey walls.

She also does a brilliant job at holding the reader’s suspense throughout the novel. The Queen doesn’t know why she was banished, she doesn’t know what has happened to the bodies of her children or her closest friend Kent. She also doesn’t know what the future holds for her, or if she will ever again see the outside of the abbey. The Queens search for the answers to these questions really drew me in and had me speculating on different theories at every turn. I didn’t manage to guess the two big reveals which further increased my regard for this book as I pride myself on being able to guess plot twists. The ending was also beautiful and bitter-sweet.

This book is heavily focused on character and prose, with a lot of flashbacks and introspection. I don’t think this is a bad thing, but it does mean that the pace is quite slow at times. It took me until the around 70-page mark to get into the story, but it was worth pushing on to this point. I still think this book could have been shortened, but overall, this didn’t spoil it for me.

I think this book deserves a lot of praise and success with readers. Fans of 'King Lear' and Shakespeare in general should put this at the top of their tbr pile, as well as those who love female-centric retellings. Overall, this book was a 4/5 for me and I will be keeping my eye out for J. R. Thorpe’s future publications.

Arc sent by publishers at my request.

[Tanja · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been a few months since I finished it, and I keep thinking about this book. It took me forever to read because it's a bit tedious since not a lot happens, and by the end I was a bit disappointed that a lot of the exciting potential ways this story could go weren't explored. But the writing is beautiful, and there are some deeply sharp observations about women throughout history, women during this time, religion, love, friendship, class, and family. It's so realistically written that it almost feels like a real account. I think a lot of thought, skill, and not to forget knowledge of Shakespeare, went into writing this novel. It probably should be assigned reading in school in conjunction with King Lear.

[G L · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like the idea of retelling a classic from the point of view of a marginalized – or, as in this case, erased – character. I’ve read several that didn’t really work for me, but this is in the category of those that succeed brilliantly. I’ve read the Shakespeare play through only once—though there are half a dozen aborted attempts to my name-- and I’ve seen a single performance (one of those National Theatre Live productions that appear from time to time at one’s local art house cinema, a stunning performance from an 80 year old Ian McKellan). That hardly counts as mastering so long and difficult a play, yet Thorpe’s novel engaged my limited experience almost seamlessly. Likely I would have picked up many more connections than I did, if I were more familiar with the Shakespeare, but Thorpe handled the elements from the play so skillfully that I rarely felt lost, and did not miss any of the characters I remembered from reading or seeing it. This novel is set just after the death of Lear, Goneril, and Regan, and alternates between Lear’s wife’s current situation, living and her memories of and reflections on her earlier life. Thorpe seemed to me to have a knack for incorporating some of the play’s more well-known phrases at just the right moment to heighten the connection between this novel and that play.

I really like the way the novel invites the reader to contemplate the play from a completely different angle. To be honest, I’d never given any thought to Lear’s wife before this. What was she like. How did she mother Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. Was she actually the mother of all three, or was she stepmother so some of them? What was her relationship with Goneril and Regan like? Does she bear any responsibility for their being some of the most unpleasant characters I have ever encountered in literature? So many questions I never knew to ask. I don’t know that Shakespeare gave that any thought either, but I found that contemplating them changes the way I think about the play. (Clearly I have to go back and reread the play!)

It seems to me that the novel fundamentally examines the problem of women and power. Problem, not because women should not wield power, but because society expects us to do so not only demurely, but in ways that are indirect and hidden from view. Learwife, whose name we do not know—who, in fact, has two names, one name that no one left alive but she (and her old friend Kent, if he still lives) knows, and the name by which the realm knew her—because a queen is not allowed to keep her own name, but must take the one that the king gives her—and whose name and identity are unknown to the other nuns in the abbey, initially had to learn how to wield political power to survive at the court, then needed those skills because her first husband was not interested in ruling, which meant that she had to step in and do a job traditionally reserved to men to keep the realm rom disintegrating. It’s a perilous task, because if she does it poorly the realm disintegrates, and if she does it too well she undermines the king and threatens the male power structure. The king’s response is to banish her to a nunnery upon his death, a fate worse than death for a woman of her temperament and skill. Thanks to her adroitness and with help from her friend Kent she escapes that fate and marries Lear.

She has to teach the same lessons about power to a young Lear, who is 5 years her junior, and, in her eyes and memory, and complete neophyte at wielding power and exerting influence. He is a reluctant student. And she must inculcate them in Goneril and Regan. In her telling, she does this with harshness that crosses into cruelty. I’m still mulling over what Thorpe is saying in these scenes. Some of them are profoundly discomfiting. One of the most uncomfortable aspects is that Cordelia is left to grow up without her mother, which suggests that it is the mother’s harshness and cruelty that provoke Goneril and Regan to the self-aggrandizing cruelty and disregard for their father’s dignity and the well-being of the realm, while Cordelia, raised by the increasingly erratic Lear, turns out quite differently. In fact, as far as I can recall that we do not see the machinations that make up of Shakespeare’s plot at all. We have glimpses of Goneril and Regan that might lead there, but Shakespeare’s outcome is not inevitable in the recollections Learwife gives us in this novel. We know that they have all died, merely. So perhaps Thorpe is not blaming Learwife in the way that she seems to be doing at first glance. There is plenty more about women and power in the contemporary scenes at the abbey. Perhaps in the end, the questions here are not merely about the problem of women and power, but about a dilemma at the heart of power itself: how does one exert power without deforming others, and without oneself becoming deformed by its exercise.

I also appreciated the use of the madwoman in the attic theme. I don’t feel like I am familiar enough with this trope to say much about Thorpe’s use of it here, but I did notice that as Learwife moves through her grief and recounts her past, she becomes more and more unhinged. That becomes especially noticeable when she is unexpectedly given power to pick the new abbess after the death of the one she’d known. The interesting thing to me is her parallel movement toward life and love. At the start of the novel, she is nameless and is as one dead, having been locked in the nunnery for 15 years, with no one except the abbess and her personal servant Ruth (evocative name, that) knowing her identity. It turns out that Lear did a pretty good job of erasing her from life when he sent her there. As the novel unfolds she moves in a direction that makes her more alive. And in reviving her past, she recovers her ability to love—to love Ruth, to love the man Lear who has abused her by banishing her without explanation or cause, and, I think, to love the daughters whom she had treated more as surrogates than as children. Her great friend Kent comes at the last (I was unsure if he was really there, or if it was a vision, but Learwife clearly believed it was the real, living, Kent), and calls her by her name.

The book did feel over long to me. I don’t know what I would cut, if I were asked to edit it, but midway through I almost despaired of finishing because of its length. I listened to the audio, which made it easier to keep going. I doubt I would have finished the print version, but the tradeoff is that the book was rich in passages I’d have liked to come back to, but it’s harder to do that in audio format. The digital platform my library uses lets me bookmark passages; unfortunately, my borrowing time ran out before I could re-listen to those and write down any quotations that I wanted to keep. Much as I loved the read, I’m not sure it’s one I’ll want to come back to, because it is so long.

This goes on my list of top 10 audiobook experiences. The writing is gorgeous, and Juliet Stevenson voices the narrator and the other characters perfectly.

[jules · Rating 3 out of 5]

more like 2.5 stars honestly. i feel very meh about this book.

the good: the prose was A Lot and every tenth sentence was a weird simile so definitely not for everyone but i actually found it enjoyable to listen to. i liked the characterization of lear's wife, i could definitely see her as someone who would have been married to that motherfucker. and the characterization of younger lear was interesting. kent characterization was good as well, gay kent so true. the ending was thematically appropriate if a little heavy-handed but i liked it okay.

the bad: my god. nothing happens in this book. like at all. and i'm not opposed to long rambly character studies but considering it's a sequelish thing to KING LEAR of all plays i expected a little action. which is really my main complaint, because this book did not feel like it should have been related to lear at all. we get some moments with younger goneril and regan, and a few of them are good, but it didn't seem like the author had any particular take on either of their characters beyond these sparse anecdotes. gloucester is a one-note creep and we don't really get any of cordelia. and there's just really nothing here that recontextualized the play for me. there were changes, because lear is apparently like 50 now (???) but nothing that happened here had any consequence on the events of canon. the main character never even learns that much about what went down. also i guess the ending reveal was kind of supposed to be a twist but i fully saw it coming. i liked the book fine enough while i was actively reading it but i was never that excited to come back to it and it didn't leave me with much either as a standalone or a lear retelling, it was kind of just...nothing.

[Deborah · Rating 5 out of 5]

A powerful novel featuring a character absent from King Lear—the queen, wife of Lear and mother of the three dead princesses. In this tale, she was summarily banished from the kingdom 15 years before for an offense of which she was never informed and exiled to live in a convent. In her long absence the events of the play transpired, and a messenger has just come riding in a lather with the news that the king and all three daughters are dead, with only sketchy details of what happened. Thus begins the story, told in the first person in gorgeously elevated diction—it feels archaic, is poetic, fierce, haunted and haunting. The queen’s voice is the most striking element of the novel, as her memories unreel and uncover her previous life in the world before her long exile. Past events are not recounted in chronological order, but as a series of brightly lit (as if by lightning) highly emotionally charged scenes. This was an imperious, astute, intelligent, fiercely emotional queen, wife and mother, who gave birth to Cordelia after her first two daughters were grown and married, and snatched from her while still a babe in arms as her banishment began unceremoniously in the dead of night.

As the queen’s mind delves into the past in grief and sorrow and rage, we also see her present life in the convent, as a struggle for succession (who will be the new abbess?) unfolds. The queen is asked to arbitrate, and these events shed light on her statecraft and mirror in small the larger events beyond the walls of the convent.

I was completely swept up in this captivating tale, which skilfully draws on the play and created a wholly plausible backstory (what was with those daughters anyway?), but is also an engaging story that stands beautifully on its own.

[Siâni · Rating 2 out of 5]

This story had a lot of promise. Female retellings of stories are very popular at the moment and I am here for it! I love King Lear and studied it for my a-level and when I saw that Learwife was something that existed, I was incredibly excited.

Turns out, Learwife is very boring.

We meet Lear’s wife after the events that take place in King Lear. She is in an abbey and learns of her daughters and husband’s death. Her plan is to go back to them to see them at their resting place but this does not happen. The abbess wishes her to stay – Learwife has made a life for herself at the abbey.

The story is mainly regarding her life at the abbey and dealing with sickness, death and succession. It is interesting that most of the book is regarding women and their relationship with power, with each other and the outer world. But this becomes quite dull.

I have to admit, I gave up at around page 220. At that point, you do not learn why Lear sent his wife away to an abbey. I do not know if Learwife did manage to leave. I was too bored, and I really did not care for Learwife. She was rude, full of herself and did not really show any strong emotion towards anything.

My expectations were high which is part of the reason why I did not get on with the book but overall, I’m just not a fan. It was slow paced, and it had quite flowery writing in places and the dialogue was written a bit stiffly.

[Paradise · Rating 1 out of 5]

As a lover of Shakespeare, I have seen King Lear several times on stage, with various interpretations of the play.

I have also read several books based on Shakespeare’s plays involving sub-characters, modified endings and more. Some have been interesting; others have not.

Sadly Lear Wife was not; it was dull, poorly written and repetitive. It felt like the author was struggling to fill the pages with words and it really dragged.

I skim read the second half to see if it picked up, but there was little or no action and just more of the same overly poetic, flowery prose...

Very disappointing.

[Siân Pycroft (plumreads__s) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't feel like I can give this a proper review for content but for some slow paced, detailed historical fiction it's an enjoyable read.

Thanks to NetGalley, Canongate and Thorp for an eArc in exchange for an honest review.

[BeccaJBooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting tale of the wife of dead King Lear and a re-imagining of her perspective.

I must say that I am completely ignorant to the King Lear story and went into this with no knowledge of the original play. So I don't think I appreciated it in the way that it was meant to be appreciated. So from that angle my review has no bearing on it's relation to the play or it's characters.

As a story, it is complex and detailed. There is an urgency and despair in the character that sucked me right in. I wanted to read more and I wanted to bask in the beauty of the writing. The prose here is so poetic and beautiful, it conveys it's message, even without being as free flowing as perhaps a more modern language might.

I was impressed with this book, but I don't think I would read it again. I enjoyed it, and afterwards felt as though I'd had a bit of wind taken out of me, but I am happy to leave it there.

www.thebeautifulbookbreak.com

[Annabelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this novel and its twist on King Lear. The prose was so decadent you could swim in it; this made reading feel like a treasure and also a slog if my mind wasn't razor-sharp, haha. I had trouble following sometimes because, wow, it was such a luscious, lyrical read that demanded all of my attention. The plot was simpler than I expected, but I appreciated how it was packaged in the end.