Near the beginning of Sara Collins’s impressive debut, her eponymous heroine, a Jamaican slave brought to Georgian England and “gifted” by her owner to his friend, observes: “A man writes to separate himself from the common history. A woman writes to try to join it.” It is an observation that sums up the heart of Collins’s novel: the female and minority voices that have been historically silenced, and how the act of writing can be a rebellion in itself.
The book begins in familiar gothic territory: the year is 1826 and we are at the Old Bailey, where Frannie is accused of murdering her new master and mistress, George and Marguerite Benham: “A noise that hums with all the spite of bees in a bush. Heads turn as I enter. Every eye a skewer.” Frannie is our narrator and her voice is assured, defiant and articulate, in spite of the catalogue of prejudices against her: “In truth, no one expects any kind of story from a woman like me. No doubt you think this will be one of those slave histories, all sugared over with misery and despair. But who’d want to read one of those?”
Instead, Collins offers us a bold and timely reinvention of the classic gothic novel: this is a story unashamedly immersed in its literary heritage. There are echoes of Jane Eyre in Frannie’s upbringing as an illegitimate child of an English plantation owner, John Langton, and his Jamaican housekeeper. Starved of love and affection, Frannie finds fulfilment and empowerment in books: “Sometimes I picture all that reading and writing as something packed inside me. Dangerous as gunpowder.” John, is obsessed with phrenology, determined to prove his theory that his slaves are of lesser intelligence by carrying out macabre experiments on them. When disaster strikes the plantation, John takes Frannie to England and offers her to George Benham, with whom Langton is keen to ingratiate himself. When Frannie meets Benham’s wife, the two of them start an affair, the unfolding of which, with its tentative exploration of passion and transgression of boundaries, is reminiscent of the best of Sarah Waters.
Collins’s writing throughout has a visceral and immediate quality, immersing the reader both in period detail and in Frannie’s experiences. When, as a child on the plantation, she is whipped for the first time, “Pain sank into my thigh like a claw. Cut hard grooves deep as nails. Whipped up a thin stream of blood, trapped my breath buried it deep.” And when Frannie first arrives in London, “The cold seemed to carry its own smell, like raw meat, and came on me sudden as a cutpurse.”
There is an impressive smorgasbord of themes at play: race, gender, class, sexuality, depression, science, education and the psychological effects of servitude. In Frannie Langton, Collins has created a truly memorable heroine and written a compelling gothic novel for our times.
• The Confessions of Frannie Langton by Sara Collins is published by Viking (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
