Gavin McCrea - Mrs. Engels: A Novel

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In September 1870 a train leaves Manchester bound for London. On board is Lizzie Burns, a poor worker from the Irish slums, who is embarking on the journey that will change her forever. Sitting in the first-class carriage beside her lover, the wealthy mill-owner Frederick Engels, the vision of a life of peace and comfort takes shape before her eyes: finally, at nearly fifty, she is to be the lady of a house and the wife to a man. Perhaps now she can put the difficulties of the past behind her, and be happy?

In Gavin McCrea’s stunning debut novel, we follow Lizzie as the promise of an easy existence in the capital slips from her view, and as she gains, in its place, a profound understanding of herself and of the world. While Frederick and his friend Karl Marx try to spur revolution among the working classes, Lizzie is compelled to undertake a revolution of another kind: of the heart and the soul. Haunted by her first love (a revolutionary Irishman); burdened by a sense of duty to right past mistakes; and torn between a desire for independence and the pragmatic need to be taken care of, Lizzie learns, as she says, that ‘the world doesn’t happen how you think it will. The secret is to soften to it, and to take its blows.’

Wry, astute and often hilarious, Lizzie is as compelling and charismatic a figure as ever walked the streets of Victorian England, or its novels

PRAISE
“This whirlwind of politics and personalities might become dizzying were it not stabilised by Lizzie’s unmistakable voice. She begins life by grabbing what she needs in order to survive; she ends it having achieved deep self-knowledge. She tells her own story with a erce wit and trenchancy, shot through with poetry... McCrea’s ctional speculation makes a ne symphony out of the silence that surrounds Lizzie Burns.”
— Helen Dunmore, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, in The Guardian

“Gavin McCrea is triumphant in his exuberant debut in creating Lizzie’s voice; she is dazzlingly convincing. Voices that feel authentic to their period and yet brim with life and verve are so rare that Mrs. Engels is my book of the month.”
— Antonia Senior, The Times of London

“This is the best kind of historical ction—oozing period detail, set in a milieu populated by famous gures and events about which much is known, but seen through the eyes of a central character who, due to her illiteracy, left no ready access to her experience in the form of letters or diary entries: a rich and accomplished rst novel.”
— Lucy Scholes, The Independent

“This is an assured, beautifully written debut.”
— Mario Reading, The Spectator

“[Lizzie’s] wittily realistic voice rings truthfully through this novel of ideas and ideals. One of the most distinctive female characters of modern ction.”
—Iain Finlayson, Saga Magazine

“McCrea’s novel, Mrs Engels, brings its historical characters to vivid and often—at least in Lizzie’s case— rambunctious life. . . Clear-eyed, sardonic, self-deprecating, she is a strong literary heroine in the mould of the main characters of Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin and Anne Enright’s The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch.”
—The Irish Times

“In this ambitious and imaginative recreation of the Victorian London world that gave birth to ‘scienti c socialism’, McCrea breathes real life into a historical character of whom we know next to nothing.”
—The Daily Mail

“A marginalized gure in the history books, the ctional Lizzie Burns is a marvelous creation: an illiterate Irish daughter of the Manchester slums whose withering deprecations cut a swathe through the self-delusions and hypocrisies of the founding fathers of Communism. . . Laugh-out-loud funny, touching and tender, and almost Dickensian in its physical descriptions of the Industrial Revolution’s worst excesses, Mrs Engels is a stunningly accomplished debut novel.”
—The Irish Examiner

“A terrific, startling read: compelling cast, involving story, historically transporting. Gavin McCrea has found an original and atmospheric way of giving resonant voice to the unsung Lizzie Burns.”
—Rachel Holmes, author of Eleanor Marx: A Life

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Gavin McCrea - Mrs. Engels: A Novel