Kym Martindale

Like Hamnet, this novel reveals the author to be uncritically in love with her protagonist and unable to get to grips really with either the early modern or medieval psyche and mindset. The past, as another novel begins, is a different country, and they do things differently there. O'Farrell is crippled by the inability to unthink (like many of us) Romanticism and its legacies regarding self and individual freedom and agency of thought and desire. She is also a very mannered writer. I don't know why so many people rate her at all.

Overwritten on the whole. There are some beautiful passages, but I got rather tired of the laboured literariness. And all that unmaking was frankly rather tedious.