The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is a story that revolves around themes of family secrets, social injustice, jealousy, trauma, and victimhood. Moreover, the history of Victorian mental asylums and the ‘myths’ of hysteria in women during the early 20th century. The narrative focuses on the effect the dynamic within the family has on an individual and their response thereof. Hence the story which charts two generations in a family showcases the burden of family secrets and trauma. Set in the Edwardian era, the story is rich with details of life in the early twentieth century that imprisoned young women in unquestioning conformity to inane social conventions, dress codes, and Scottish propriety that, to my modern mind, are stifling enough to drive anyone crazy. While the story that unfolds is a relatively fast read, it does skip from one narrator to another without much to mark the difference except breaks from one paragraph to a new one, an extra line or two in space, and someone else is relaying their views – still, I was always aware of the change in narrator when it happened, so I didn’t find it to be confusing, and I felt it gave a broader view of the overall story. why ) but they forget about her. The family goes on a trip and leaves Esme , as they don’t want to deal with her, home with the nursemaid and her baby brother Hugo. While they are gone, the unthinkable happens , and Esme is alone for several days and traumatized by what has happened. The cruelty continues and Esme mother won’t speak to her or even look at her.

The main strands are Esme’s childhood and her old age. In the latter, the asylum is about to close and a young woman called Iris is involved in what happens to her next. This is a novel with a very complex time scheme. What techniques does the author use to handle this? What Maggie O’Farrell gives us is Esme’s story, which is a sad and infuriating one, and Iris’s story which has at least one sad element of its own. Neither of these women does exactly what people expect of them, and one of them has paid a price beyond belief for being independent and different.O’Farrell’s novel is steeped in secrets. As the story of Esme and Kitty unfolds simultaneously with the story of Iris and Alex, O’Farrell offers clues about the true nature of the relationships between these characters. What effect does this have on your compassion for them? How do these two stories relate to each other? Iris and Alex seem to live in their own world, keeping others—even Alex’s wife and Iris’s lovers—on the outside. How does the author let you know that Iris doesn’t like Fran without coming out and saying so? How does she reveal that Alex and Luke don’t like each other? How do these revelations serve a function in the progress of the novel?

Esme Lennox's story is a tragic one and it brings up how easily men, and families, disposed of the women who didn't conform, who were different. I thought to myself, this novel is going to gut me and leave me emotionally deplete. Incredibly enough, it didn't happen. It had many ingredients that made it very readable, some confusing paragraphs, side romances and a brusque, vague ending, which was anti-climatic. Each of the narrator's stories is spellbinding. We learn a lot of Kitty's story through her rambling and mostly disjointed thoughts. One thought will lead her to another without the first having been completed. You would think that this would be extremely annoying, but it's not. It is a glimpse into the mind of someone with a form of dementia, where the past becomes the present. She does not recognize Iris, expecting her to still be a small child in a pretty dress, not a confident young woman. A more benign residential institution was my boarding school. I’ve just written about my time there, in lieu of a review of Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s Terms & Conditions, HERE. I have been wanting to read Maggie O’Farrell’s novels for the last couple of years, ever since I first read my friend Angela’s review of This Must Be the Place and I’d long planned to read some of these books that I’d had on my list to-read for too long, and so I’d scheduled a period of time to devote just to those books. There are so many I doubt I will get to them all, but I began this by reading O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox - not because I’d chosen to read this one first, but because it was available through my library. I’m so glad that I did, this is beautifully written, heartbreaking, tragic and unputdownable. We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.”Iris is torn between her reluctance of taking on a mad and possibly dangerous old woman and her curiosity. Compassion overrides caution when she learns that in the 1930s, a G.P.’s signature sufficed for a father or a husband to have a woman committed for life. O’Farrell poignantly describes the growing bond that forms between Iris and Esme as Esme gathers her courage for her inevitable reunion with Kitty, who has betrayed her in the most unspeakable way. After years of compulsive reading around the subject (she has a “Hamlet” shelf in her study), she grew increasingly frustrated both by the way in which Hamnet had been overlooked by scholars, his death often dismissed as an inevitability of the high child mortality rate and their unwillingness to recognise the personal significance of Shakespeare naming his greatest tragedy after him. “Come on! It’s the same name.” Hamnet is her attempt to give this boy, “consigned to being a literary footnote … a presence and a voice. To say he was important and that he was not just another Elizabethan child statistic, and that without him we wouldn’t have Hamlet and we probably wouldn’t have Twelfth Night.” It is not giving too much away (the tragedy happens in the middle, after all) to say that Hamnet ends with a performance of Hamlet. “I wanted to ask questions about where art comes from, where writing comes from, or why we need to do it,” she says. “How it can come from a very painful place, but that’s why we need to do it.” The play is the thing: like Hamlet eliciting Claudius’s guilt in the mousetrap scene, Hamnet reveals the “huge chasm of grief” behind the play, which takes on a whole new perspective. “It seems very much a one-sided message of a father in one realm to a son in another.” Esme's father is not interested in finding out why his daughter acts the way that she does - he just requires that she stops. For this reason he washes his hands of her and has her committed into a hospital for the insane. This is a huge betrayal as she loves her father very much. He is an authoritarian and closed the book on Esme as soon as she is admitted to the institution. James Dalziel

She first had the germ of the idea at school, when an English teacher mentioned the existence of Shakespeare’s son, called Hamnet, who had died aged 11, four or five years before the the playwright wrote Hamlet. She remembers sitting in a chilly Scottish classroom and putting her finger over the letter “L” on her copy of the play (the two names “were entirely interchangeable” at the time). “The idea of this boy and of his name being used by his father just got under my skin. I could never forget about it.” And Iris, herself, has a knotted past and a knotted present. She has been in a relationship with a man who keeps her on the fringes. And there is nothing but confusion and uncertainty about another relationship that she's currently pondering. Iris has difficulty coming face-to-face with reality. And is that in the hand-me-down genetics or of her own making? THE AUTHOR: Born in Northern Ireland in 1972, MAGGIE O'FARRELL grew up in Wales and Scotland and now lives in London. She has worked as a waitress, chambermaid, bike messenger, teacher, arts administrator, and journalist in Hong Kong and London, and as the deputy literary editor of The Independent on Sunday. They all said, 'Did they let you keep it?'" The nurse sighed. "How could I have explained to them about an outside world where you're allowed to keep your own baby, where no one would even think about taking it away?" Iris’s grandmother Kitty always claimed to be an only child. But Esme’s papers prove she is Kitty’s sister, and Iris can see the shadow of her dead father in Esme’s face.I read this book because I was high on O’Farrell’s memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. I knew her language fits me—it makes me feel all floaty and it makes my soul all happy. And as I said, I love crazy and I love loony bins—as any zealous ex-Psych major would. I have no idea how Maggie Farrell came up with this idea, but it was certainly interesting. How anyone in their right mind could be bored by this novel would be a mystery to me. How do you think people’s attitudes towards unmarried mothers have changed since Esme was a young girl? How different would her life have been had she been able to keep her baby?

The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox is a beautifully written and haunting story about a woman who has been unjustly incarcerated in a mental hospital at a very young age and has remained there for over sixty years. The hospital is now closing down and the inhabitants have to be rehoused. The story is set between the 1930s and the present day. There were of course some happy endings. In 1911 Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote The Secret Garden, about Mary Lennox, a difficult child whose mother had disliked her. All her family were wiped out by cholera, and she was found alone in an empty house near the body of her ayah. In England she blossoms, cured by love and education. In O'Farrell's book we have Esme Lennox, a difficult child whose mother dislikes her, who is found during a cholera epidemic alone in an empty house beside the body of her ayah and clutching the corpse of her baby brother. It is as if O'Farrell is rewriting the story of The Secret Garden's heroine had she come home to maternal hatred and loneliness and been refused the chance to learn. I love haunting and intriguing novels and The vanishing Acts of Esme Lennox was exactly what I love. What I found begged the question of what would have happened to many of us had we been born into a different time. A time when a man could commit a wife or daughter to an asylum with just a signature from a GP. A time when it was considered a sign of insanity to refuse to cut your hair. Or to be found trying on your mother's clothes. Or to turn down offers of marriage. Or to show reluctance to sit on your relatives' knees. Or to not wash your kitchen floor for a week. Or to feel sad and weary after having given birth. These were all written in asylum records in the early half of the last century. Esme can unfocus her eyes and unsee the world around. In this quasi-fugue state, she becomes almost invisible herself - two of at least three types of titular vanishing.Esme's mother is an emotionally remote parent whose love is conditional upon her daughters conforming to the stereotype that she requires. Chiefly this involves marrying well - although Esme is a good student and excelling at academics she is not allowed to stay on at school or further her education as her mother believes it is kore important that a woman married well than has a career - or is happy. She is froM the "spare the rod and spoil the child" school of thought when it comes to punishment and will be cruel in dishing punishment out to Esme. She clearly favors Kitty. She endured some great losses as she had miscarriages and gave birth to a stillborn child as well as losing her only son Hugo. Esme's Father What ensues is the story of Esme, the unforgiveable decisions taken, the resolute and ill placed righteousness of the people who judged her insane, the people who watched and did nothing, and the disclosure of events that led to her incarceration. However, the undercurrent of mental health versus "being different" continues as a thread through the novel and suggests that Esme is a product of her own family’s vulnerabilities and shaped by family traits passed from generation to generation as the dark and mysterious past and untold secrets are unspooled with devastating consequences. I kept seeing all these wonderful review for books by Maggie O'Farrell. I kept saying, oh I need to read her, that's one author I've yet to try, and I added her to my TBR pile.....where she remained for some time. Recently read another review by my GR friend Angela and I said now I must finally read one of her books. So I grabbed the audio version of this book and I must say....I'm hooked. I want to read all her books. Maggie O’Farrell takes readers on a journey to the darker places of the human heart, where desires struggle with the imposition of social mores. This haunting story explores the seedy past of Victorian asylums, the oppression of family secrets, and the way truth can change everything.