She has grown up to the smell of “wet ink” as her feminist mother Julia (“Mammie”) defies prejudice and poverty to preach liberation and equality. Lizzie Fawkes, her young heroine, comes from a radical family of campaigners and pamphleteers. Around these twin movements her plot pivots. Meanwhile, on the slopes of Clifton, speculative developers invest in a property boom that sends elegant neo-classical terraces – more covetable today than ever – marching across the downs. Here, in 17, local radicals cheer on the progress of the French Revolution. In Birdcage Walk, she comes home to her own city of Bristol. As she makes clear in an Afterword, “I wanted to write about people whose voices have not echoed through time and whose struggles and passions have been hidden from history.” Whether in the Russian-occupied Finland of House of Orphans, the Nazi-bombarded Leningrad of The Siege or the closed and deceitful post-war England of Exposure, Dunmore draws on all her lavish talent for the recreation of period, place and atmosphere to flesh out “history from below”. Angles of vision shift so that war, revolution and upheaval thunder in the wings while ordinary people – above all, women without rank or riches – strive to safeguard a decent, even a free, life for themselves and their loved ones. Her consistently fine fiction – and, over 15 novels, her standards have never lapsed – happens in the margin or hinterland of great events. Throughout her career as novelist and poet, Helen Dunmore has woven garlands for the forgotten dead.
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