[amazon_link id=”0547490801″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ][/amazon_link]Title : Accidents of Providence
Author : Stacia M. Brown
Genre : Historical
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Source : NetGalley/Publisher ARC
Rating 3.5/5

“Accidents of Providence” is a work of fiction set in the Cromwellian era of 1649, with characters based on some historical figures. In it Ms. Brown tells the story of Rachel Lockyer, a young unmarried woman, a glove-maker’s assistant, who gets pregnant. When her child dies – it is unclear whether it is still-born or not, she is targeted by Cromwell’s strict laws for “lewd women”, particularly the “Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murdering of Bastard Children(1624)”. Rachel is arrested and Thomas Bartwain, the gouty, 61 year old criminal investigator for the state must decide upon her guilt before she can be sentenced.

As the trial progresses and Bartain struggles with the testimony of the witnesses, we, the readers, get a better picture of the train of events and the characters in it – Rachel herself, her Huguenot employer Marie du Gard who has brought Rachel’s dead child to notice, Rachel’s lover the Leveler William Walwyn – a much married man and father to 14 children, her good friend Elizabeth Lillburne who tries to keep Rachel from punishment.

Most of the book deals with the narration of the events – the before, the during and the after of the child-birth, until it comes to the expected conclusion. There is no mystery or head-turning surprises here, rather it is the depiction of Rachel’s life – lone and unwed and at the mercy of a vindictive, Puritan state. The book can be intense and heavy in parts, and has a lot of detail on people and events, which make it an excellent read.

Ms. Brown develops her characters well. There is a lot of history – Rachel, Walwyn, John Lilburne are Levelers, a political faction which wants to level the opportunities for everyone – they want equality. Thomas Bartwain the investigator wants to do his duty, but his conscience and his wife have helped raised niggling doubts about what the state is asking him to do. The author also does a good job of showing us the state of women in those times. Rachel says it well :

“For myself, I have had so many hands and fingers clawing ay me my whole life long, telling me this and that and all the other is my duty, telling me fifteen duties in a row and then reminding me nothing I do matters because God has already decided one way or another, that I can hardly see what I am obliged to do or not do in this life; I can hardly lay all my duties on the table!”

The law of the time apparently punished only the mother if an illegitimate died and it was upto the mother to prove her innocence – i.e.; that the child had been still-born. If the child survived, the court could order the father fined or flogged. Eerily the problems of an unwanted pregnancy of the mid 1600s, really a very, very long time ago, reminds me of the present day, and the current ongoing war to curb women’s rights to contraception:

Rachel remembered one account of a maid-servant who went to a midwife for a blood-letting and emerged with her feet bound in red rags but her regular cycle restored. Then there was the mother of eleven who had tied her undergarments devilishly tight and pressed and flattened her stomach with a rolling pin. The next day her monthlies returned, though for weeks afterward her limbs spasmed and stiffened at inopportune moments, like a prisoner stretched on an invisible rack. Rachel remembered asking if it was a sin, what these women had done. Her great-aunt had waved this question off, her wooden spoon in her hand. She said women had neither the time nor the luxury to quibble over what was and was not a sin.

This is a well-researched, nuanced story and an engrossing read. Recommended.