Across her prolific 30-year career Emma Donoghue’s novels have ranged widely both in time (back as far as AD600) and place (from Ireland and the French Riviera to Canada and the west coast of the US), but perhaps the most striking feature of her work remains the devastating intensity she brings to bear on constrained, often profoundly claustrophobic spaces. From the scrap of island in Haven to the maternity ward in The Pull of the Stars, from Anna’s cramped bedroom in The Wonder to the harrowing 11ft-by-11ft confinement of Jack and Ma in her multimillion bestseller Room, Donoghue is a master of the microcosm.
The rules and privations of a small girls’ boarding school in the early 19th century must have proved an irresistible lure. In Learned By Heart, Donoghue explores the real-life relationship between Anne Lister and Eliza Raine when the two girls were pupils at Miss Hargrave’s Manor school in York. Lister, best known to modern audiences as the inspiration for Sally Wainwright’s BBC drama Gentleman Jack, was a landowner, a businesswoman, a prolific diarist and openly lesbian; in 1834 she exchanged rings with Ann Walker at York’s Holy Trinity church in the first recorded lesbian marriage ceremony in British (and possibly world) history.
