“The only lesson I learned, or at least the only lesson I remember, was you.”
Emma Donoghue’s Learned by Heart is a poignant, intense and intricately-woven exploration of first love between Anne Lister and Eliza Raine, who share an attic room, known as ‘The Slope’, in their York boarding school.
Lister, an iconic businesswoman, landowner and diarist, is known to many readers from the BBC series ‘Gentleman Jack’. Eliza Raine was an orphan, born in Madras and forced to return to England.
Through Raine’s eyes, Lister is bright, bold and inquisitive – a maverick unafraid to challenge authority, and to do so loudly.
The intensity (and secrecy) of their connection is palpable, the claustrophobia mirroring the confines of their physical space.
Donoghue alternates the school narrative with Raine’s letters to Lister years later sent from her asylum. By this time, Raine is resentful, bitter and entreating by turns, lamenting the lost love and infusing the schoolgirls’ burgeoning relationship with poignancy.
While the historical detail and meticulous research is commendable and certainly enhanced the authenticity of the narrative, I felt it overwhelmed the narrative at times, at the expense of pace.
In spite of this, the novel is a compelling imagining of two girls in the first flushes of young love, learning their hearts and finding their feet. For Raine, that love endured beyond the confines of a boarding school attic.
It was an ending – the ending she yearned for all her life.
For Lister, the story was just beginning.
Victoria Brown 