Lily: A Tale of Revenge from the Sunday Times bestselling author

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When we first meet Lily she’s 17, it’s 1867 and she is wracked with guilt which weighs her down with the enormity of a crime that is making her ill. L'écriture évocatrice nous transporte en un rien de temps dans les rues de Londres à l'époque victorienne où se côtoient violence et misère, mais aussi dans les belles campagnes anglaises, seul refuge pour notre héroïne dickensienne, seul rempart contre un destin funeste auquel elle tente d'échapper. Lily’s story is one of fleeting kindness, institutional cruelty, breathless possibilities, and – as a young woman reunited with Sam – volatile desires; it is also, as the book’s subtitle notes: a tale of revenge. Parts of the story are told in retrospect, which can be a bit frustrating, but slowly the tale is told.

Her memory of a stint with foster parents, in a countryside setting which is a Constable sunset compared to the Doré hellscape that is Victorian London, sustains her through her later years at the Foundling Hospital. This is a mystery/historical fiction book with a beautiful cover that sounded so good to me, I read the blurb and I was desperate to read it and I have to say I was disappointed. It would have been much more satisfying to have Lily board a boat to say, New York, with the lesson that adversity builds character and drive. Across the years, the policeman who found her keeps watch over Lily and when he meets her again, there is an instant attraction between them and it is this story which takes us forward.

Having read to her own grandchildren for years, she’s written an upcoming story for youngsters, Iron Robin (her first children’s book since 1985’s Journey To The Volcano), featuring Richard Jones’s beguiling illustrations.

It’s not the only time that London has emerged as a dislocated and seedy setting in Tremain’s stories; in Restoration, it is both wanton playground and fiery hell; in The Road Home (2007), we view modern London from the perspective of eastern European immigrant Lev: its potential for renewal, and its bleak chasm between social classes. In this novel Rose Tremain throws a deeply unflattering light on the Victorian interpretation of Christian charity. Lily had a happy time with her foster parents, Perkin and Nelly Buck, who ran Rookey Farm in Suffolk, and their three sons, and the idyllic rural life is described. Or she goes back to Rookery Farm where she lives the rest of her life pretty much the same as it used to be - with everyone around and full of love. In London, in the winter of 1850, baby Lily Mortimer is found abandoned at the gates of a park by a young police constable, who takes her to the London Foundling Hospital.The content and realism was definitely my bag, but I found the story difficult to follow, jumping across timelines and it also seemed to lack depth of plot and subtlety. Subtitled ‘A Tale of Revenge’, the narrative moves back and forth in time between Lily’s early years spent with a foster family, her time at the London Foundling Hospital and her subsequent employment at Belle Prettywood’s Wig Emporium. However, I did find that the narrative jumped about from the present to her childhood with her foster parents, then at the Foundling Hospital which at times caused confusion, and there were no chapter breaks, just one paragraph after another. Yet, memories of her time in the foundation and a need to understand her origins underpin her daily life. The next morning Sam told her that he and his wife had felt that she was troubled and that no one was taking care of her, and they offered to have her stay with them.

Its founder and governors were kindly, god-fearing men; and wealthy women, like Lily’s benefactress, Lady Elizabeth Mortimer, helped to support such benevolent institutions.

However, it's very well done, and Lily herself is a wonderfully drawn character; spirited, flawed, and all too human. It’s the story of Lily Mortimer who is abandoned as a baby and taken in by the Foundling Hospital in London. Lily is not a joyful, bawdy, Dickensian romp, replete with cheeky cockney clichés and rosy-cheeked orphans. The Hospital would pay foster parents to raise orphans through their earliest childhood, and Lily is lucky enough to be placed with Nellie Buck, a kind and motherly woman who has only sons, and falls in love with bright, pretty little Lily, as Lily does with her. I visited the museum out of curiosity soon after arriving in London and have since been fascinated not only by its mission to take London’s then-numerous abandoned children off the streets, but also by its achievement in attracting celebrity patrons of its day such as George Frederic Handel and William Hogarth.