FICTION
A great act of love
Heather Rose
Allen & Unwin, $34.99

be price It’s not a dark and stormy night as Heather Rose’s new novel opens, but a warm midsummer evening, 1836, London. The moon is full and Caroline, responding to her father’s whistle from the sidewalk, rushes up the stairs for this unexpected meeting. His way of stirring is, his skin is if and when she reaches for his hand, she is cut by a short knife covered in blood. She takes it from him and throws it into the Thames. He walks away into the shadows and Caroline, a mere slip of a girl, retreats into a terrible loneliness.

Heather Rose is revered by those who award literary prizes, but she has the distinction of being adored by readers of popular fiction as well. She is restless with her gifts, writes about and about art, politics, contemporary families, is a memoirist, a writer for children and adolescents. A great act of love is her sixth adult novel, but her first historical, and it crackles with masterful taste.

The melodramatic opening of A great act of love, an elevated environment with visual cues, sets the pace and the tone. Expectations rise as the curtain rises, the stage is balanced by candlelight, the characters come from above and below and often across. But. what is it What? You slouch forward in your seat. The dress and props are all early Victorian, but the characters seem to have bent time. These well-dressed people may dress with the formality of the past, but they are of the present, as of 2025. The Bridgerton influence? How daring. And sometimes, how darling.

Within a dozen pages, years have flown and Caroline has a new profession involving disguises, chess, theft, money and gender reassignment. She is under the supervision of her father’s capable sister, Henriette, a woman of the future as well as the past. Meanwhile, her father, who killed a woman in a moment of madness, was sentenced to death. However, the Crown does not feel like hanging the insane, and he is transported to Australia, where he will live out the term of his natural life in a grim place on the edge of the world, Norfolk Island.

Caroline, now a well-educated woman in her early 20s, has visions and dreams of her father as a boy walking through his ancestral vineyards in France – vineyards that once produced the most celebrated champagne in France. Her father is the central love of her life. He understood her, educated her, gave her his knowledge of botany and medicine as she worked alongside him in his London pharmacy business. This specialized education sustains her throughout her life as she goes on a quest to reunite with her father. Can a young woman dream herself in another world, another person?

At 23, she takes a ship to America and books a passage from there which, she hopes, will take her to Van Diemen’s Land. Her disguise is that of a young and rich widow – an impeccable guise for a woman who men immediately admire. Yet perhaps a disguise is a possibility that could become a reality. We all make ourselves up as we go, change, or not, in the face of need, or danger. In her quest to see her father again, Caroline understands that she is a woman who must call up a new story every day to live. She is, like all those other women who imagine themselves, Scheherazade.

Heather Rose is herself an ingenious Scheherazade, who holds together the intricacies, or chaos, of various lives and organizes them into a generally coherent and generally satisfying whole which, by the way, is called history.