amazing ability to pull you in - gripping and informative
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I expecting to be extremely bored with this book and was astonished to find myself unable to put it down and dreading having to finish it.
This book provided me with so much insight into the religious and political travesties of the time and painted a bleak but realistic picture of just what it was like to be female for so many centuries. The story moves slowly yet is full of inuendo and intrigue. Every word must be read as stunning revelations can occur so unexpectadely. The story is laced with passion and lust yet hardly a finger is raised, and mostof the charcters are fervently religious nuns and priests. It raises again so many questions about the (catholic) church and leave me wondering (not for the first time) are these orders gentle faiths or sadistic cults.
I cant beleive I havent heard more about this book.
Highly enjoyable.
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A historical novel
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After Mary tells the story of Isabel Stanhope, a secret Catholic devotee of Mary Ward in Protestant England of the early 1600's. Rich in research, McMahon traces Isabel's story from England to Rome, and is highly successful in creating an atmosphere of whispering conspiracy and the loss of faith that accompanies Isabel's eventual disappointment with Ward. Yet the book faces the same problem that often attends historical novels attempting to recount a time when there was a different idiom: that is, how does one accurately relate the mood of past times using an idiom that the modern reader can understand? McMahon is often unsuccessful in her attempt to balance the past with the present, and thus behind many well written scenes lies language which jars the reader into the present. Sometimes McMahon is so intent to connect with her audience that she resorts to tired clichés: 'She was not after all a minor member of his vast flock, but Isabel, Mistress Stanhope, whose presence cut through his priesthood like a knife through thick butter'.
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A good historical novel
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This interesting and perceptive novel is set at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It follows the progress of Isabella Stanhope, a young upper class Catholic woman, as she searches for integration into a Catholic life that is outlawed in England, and for the fulfillment of the vocation she imagines for herself, that of a nun. This being the seventeenth century, religion is never far away from politics, and the novel explores the effect on English Catholic life in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, a period in which secrecy and dissembling were vital to the survival of English Catholics. Isabella becomes involved with a new religious order, and experiences the hostility of the Catholic Church towards new forms of religious life for women. In this world of turmoil she comes to perceive that things and people are seldom what they appear to be. This is an interesting novel, both as historical novel and as psychological novel.
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