#BlogTour ‘Born Of No Woman’ by Franck Bouyesse trans by Lara Vergnaud

About the book…

Nineteenth-century rural France.

Before he is called to bless the body of a woman at the nearby asylum, Father Gabriel receives a strange, troubling confession: hidden under the woman’s dress he will find the notebooks in which she confided the abuses she suffered and the twisted motivations behind them.

And so Rose’s terrible story comes to light: sold as a teenage girl to a rich man, hidden away in a old manor house deep in the woods and caught in a perverse web, manipulated by those society considers her betters.

A girl whose only escape is to capture her life – in all its devastation and hope – in the pages of her diary…

My thanks to publishers, W&N for my gifted review copy, and Anne Cater of Random Things for my blog tour invite. ‘Born Of No Woman’ is published in hardcover and e-book formats from 21st October.

It is difficult to know exactly where to begin-this book transcends genres, and creates a gothic fiction, with mystery wrapped in its heart.

Who is Rose, the woman whom priest, Gabriel, has been requested to bless at the asylum hidden in the woods?

What is her story, and who has Gabriel handed her story to, all these later, as he stares into the inevitable endless sleep?

How did she end up where she died, accused of having killed her own child, and then taking leave of her senses?

Gabriel is asked, whilst taking confession, to attend the woman whose body he will soon be giving last rites to, to take Rose’s story from under her clothes, where the notebooks have been secreted, and let her story be known. Thinking this an unusual request , he acquiesces days later when a worker at the asylum requests his presence. All the women at the asylum are searched on arrival and departure, but surely no one would suspect a priest? And a man? Heaven forfend! 

The doctor at the asylum will not even tell Gabriel her name, saying

‘She has no family left.Wouldn’t it be laudable, charitable even, to do away with the thing linking her to her sin…meaning her name?’

Having asked for solitude, he removes, from under the skirt, and between the knees of a woman who looks younger than he expected, hair whitened as if by shock or trauma, two notebooks. The symbolism of this is not lost on this reader, she is giving birth to her story in the hope of her life having had some meaning.

Taking it home, Gabriel feeling that his parents’ hopes in his evangelical name raising him to heights within the parochial system, does his duty, both ecumenical and ethical by the woman who introduces herself, in her own story as –

‘Everything’s quiet.There’s no more time to lose.This is it. Time to jump into the cold water. My name is Rose. That’s how I’m called…’

This novel is a damning indictment that, whilst set in France, could be literally anywhere as it reflects the patriarchal ownership which men with money laud over girls who have none. Power is equated with financial stability and Rose makes this very clear in her story-she is one of four daughters born to a farmer and his wife, who never smiled-her birth was an inconvenience at best and a financial burden at worst.

The burden is lifted when her father sells her into service . And things only get steadily, inexorably worse.

So her name does not even belong to her, we are not even sure that Rose is her name, nor the crime ascribed to her even hers. Her seclusion in the asylum, built by a philanthropic gentleman to research mental health disorders after the constant demolition and rebuilding of the monastery that was on that site, merely represents the disquieting way in which those with mental afflictions are hidden from ‘polite’ society. Locked in a maze of madness, inside another mad maze. Out of sight, and disposable, another woman whose purpose was seemingly unfulfilled and who died a sinner.

The juxtaposition of the angelic named Gabriel, and the deceased woman whose story he tells, has added pathos as only someone who has given themselves over to religious leanings, that level of purity, can be granted the telling of this woman’s tale.

Her name was stolen from her, her prospects trodden under foot and now, even in death, she is relying on a man to do the right thing and also pass her story to an , as yet, unidentified relative. The contrast between lack of autonomous choice in sexual encounters, enjoyment in sexual encounters, with  choosing celibacy and forsaking carnal knowledge is reflected so well in the manner in which both Gabriel, and Rose, tell their tale.

It is a mesmeric undertaking which made this reader tearful, angry, and mournful for how Rose was treated, how women are still undervalued in this, the 21st century, and still are told to sit down, take your allotment in life and, above all, be kind. don’t stand up, don’t fight back, you have no voice or value.

And, in the telling of Rose’s tale, we can see , little by little, who she was, what meant the most to her, and , most of all, that she lived, she was, for one brief period of time, here. And that matters.

About the author…