Redoubtable heroines, determined women and unlikely romances in latest crop of novels

by Sarah Marsh

(Tinder Press, $37.99)

It’s the fast-changing world of Boston and London in the 1870s, a time of invention and industrialisation. Our heroine, Ellen Lark, is a bright young woman who became deaf at the age of four after scarlet fever. Now in her teens, she is studying speech with Alexander Graham Bell, the Scottish-born Boston University professor and inventor.

Bell, whose mother was deaf, teaches deaf students to speak through his father’s method, Visible Speech. He is strongly anti-sign language among the deaf community, seeing it as isolating. Many deaf and mute schools at the time punished children for using it rather than communicating in speech or writing.

Ellen is a product of this education, though she signed with her sister when young and became adept at lip reading with her English mother. Intrigued by the ebullient Bell, Ellen, with good copy-writing skills, helps him so he can work on his inventions, including what will become the telephone. Her life becomes more complicated when she meets Frank, a deaf and mute young man who teaches her to embrace sign language and shows her how self-reliant it can be with its own printing press and businesses. But Bell disapproves of the relationship.

Sarah Marsh alternates between two timelines: the period in Boston, and three years on when Ellen is living in London with her stepfather and his nephew, Harmon Bardsley, her fiancé. Bell is newly arrived in England, promoting his telephone invention. He wants Ellen to support his claim on the patent for the telephone, even as she is enlisted by a connection of Frank’s to spy on Bell and discover if he, in fact, stole the telephone technology from another inventor.

Marsh herself is deaf, as are her parents, and she writes about the condition beautifully and with deep understanding. She creates excellent tension in a story based on true elements, as the men in Ellen’s life chase glory and money, trying to bend her to their will.

by Ellen Feldman

(Macmillan, $37.99)

Fanny Fabricant welcomes her doctor husband Max back from World War II only to lose him tragically, shortly after they’ve shifted to the New York suburbs with their little girl Chloe. An intelligent young woman who studied English literature at a liberal women’s art college, Fanny swiftly has to find a plan B. Back to New York City they go, to be close to Fanny’s aunt Rose, a successful seamstress who sent her to college and is her closest family member. Through Rose’s contacts, Fanny finds work in the theatrical world of radio serials, as an assistant to the doyenne of radio soaps, Alice Anderson.