"Lily" by Rose Tremain

Tremendous verisimilitude but a dearth of complex characters in this novel about Victorian England.

 Foundling Lily, saved from wolves as a newborn by a policeman, is raised by the Coram foundation. Following an idyllic six years raised on a farm in the countryside, she is returned to the strictures and abuses of the orphanage. As a young adult becomes a wig-maker (hair is a theme that runs through the novel). But she has murdered someone and when she re-encounters the policeman who saved her, now a detective, she realises that her discovery is inevitable. 

Following the first line hook "She dreams of her death", we are told that the eponymous protagonist-narrator has murdered someone but it is not until we are two-thirds of the way through the book that we finally witness it happening. I felt that this was over-prolonged, perhaps because there is little drama elsewhere in this predictable story about hardship and cruelty in a Victorian orphanage.

This is the sort of historical novel in which the past is viewed through the eyes of the present. It therefore presented easy targets and was inevitably condemned. Opposing arguments (such as the idea that life inside the orphanage, for all its traumas, is better than the life of an orphan on the streets of London) are weakly made. I prefer novels which challenge contemporary thinking and make me think, such as the robust defence of zoos mounted in Life of Pi by Yann Martel.

The story is thoroughly grounded in the period; the author's research creates enormous verisimilitude. But the characters are either goody-goodies (the rustics) or baddies (of course, the figures of authority who are either unspeakably wicked or complacently ineffective). This undermines the realism and turns this bildungsroman into a fairy tale.

Selected quotes:

• "Swaithey was a place where life more more slowly than time." (Rookery Farm)
• "Age kills us piece by piece." (The Brass Crucifix)
• "The long sigh of someone whose habit it was to sound a lamentation on her daily quota of existence." (The Brass Crucifix)

I have loved some Rose Tremain novels (The Road Home, Absolutely and Forever, The Gustav Sonata) but this is one of the ones which was merely okay.

November 2025; 274 pages

First published by Chatto & Windus in 2021

My Penguin Vintage paperback was issued in 2022

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Rose Tremain novels:

• Sadler's Birthday (1976)
• Letter to Sister Benedicta (1978)
• The Cupboard (1981)
• Journey to the Volcano (1985)
• The Swimming Pool Season (1985)
• Restoration (1989)
• 1989 Sunday Express Book of the Year
• Shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize
• Sacred Country (1992)
• Winner of the 1992 James Tait Black Memorial Prize
• Winner of the 1994 Prix Femina Etranger
• The Way I Found Her (1997)
• Music and Silence (1999)
• Winner of the 1999 Whitbread Award
• The Colour (2003)
• The Road Home (2008)
• Trespass (2010)
• Merivel: A Man of His Time (2012)
• Shortlisted for the 2012 Wellcome Book Prize
• Shortlisted for the 2013 Walter Scott prize
• The Gustav Sonata (2016)
• Winner of the 2016 National Jewish Book Award
• Shortlisted for the 2016 Costa Book Awards
• Longlisted for the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for fiction
• Winner of the 2017 Ribalow Prize
• Islands of Mercy (2020)
• Lily: A Tale of Revenge (2021)
• Absolutely & Forever (2023)
• Shortlisted for the 2024 Walter Scott Prize