Susanna Moore’s fifth novel opens on board the Jupiter in February 1836, with the ladies — make that a capital ‘L’ — Eleanor and Harriet, together with their brother Henry (the incoming governor-general), en route to India. Storms rattle the halyards, rats scrabble at the sodden travelling library and Eleanor, our raisonneur, is somewhat put out to find her own excrement floating back and forth through the flooded cabin. Subsequently, as the Bay of Bengal looms before them, she professes herself ‘shocked at the violence I discover in myself’. Later, inevitably, she will be shocked by the violence she discovers in other people.
A first sighting of Calcutta’s chaotic quayside offers only ‘a melancholy absence of official dignity’. Happily this soon yields to the splendours of Government House, where the danger is that ‘I am learning to deny myself nothing’.
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