Gulliver’s Wife, by Lauren Chater

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I made space for three books on my Australian shelf A-D when I took this one down to read during further travails with my eyes. It’s a big, fat book, with a big, well-spaced font, and a coherent chronological sequence of events which made it easy to read in the brief windows of time when my eyes weren’t bothering me.

I admit to being attracted by the beautiful cover design, but the blurb is enticing too.

London, 1702. When her husband is lost at sea, Mary Burton Gulliver, midwife and herbalist, is forced to rebuild her life without him. But three years later when Lemuel Gulliver is brought home, fevered and communicating only in riddles, her ordered world is turned upside down.

In a climate of desperate poverty and violence, Mary is caught in a crossfire of suspicion and fear driven by her husband’s outlandish claims, and it is up to her to navigate a passage to safety for herself and her daughter, and the vulnerable women in her care.

When a fellow sailor, a dangerous man with nothing to lose, appears to hold sway over her husband, Mary’s world descends deeper into chaos, and she must set out on her own journey to discover the truth of Gulliver’s travels . . . and the landscape of her own heart.

Frontispiece illustration by Leonard Weisgard, see below

Like the best historical fiction, the story still has resonance today.  The Gulliver known to those of us who read the children’s version of  Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels, told us about his gentleness and good behaviour and though his motives were mixed, he proved himself to be a friend of the Lilliputians.  But the Gulliver of Gulliver’s Wife is not a nice man, and the novel is a cautionary tale about the complexities and risks of marital loyalty. Which is especially problematic if there is a suspicion of mental illness, but pity and compassion compromise decisions that must be made.

Even today, a traveller who returns home with strange tales that test credibility would raise eyebrows, and in Chater’s novel, it certainly did in the early 18th century.  When Lemuel returns after a long absence with bizarre tales of little people, his wife Mary fears the consequences.  For him, and for her.

She suspects that he is mad, and that means the end of his career as a surgeon, because reputation means everything at a time when medical services were haphazard, to say the least. Worse, unless she can conceal it, his madness, most likely, means incarceration in a primitive asylum.  Mary had seen her mother in an asylum, living with what was probably the late stages of dementia, and she was haunted by it.

But she also has to protect her own reputation.  Having learned long ago that Lemuel is an unreliable husband who drinks and gambles and pawns her most treasured possessions, in the three years of his absence Mary has built up her practice as a midwife to become one of the most respected in her community.   They are still poor, but they are getting by. Any hint of her husband’s ‘malady’ threatens the livelihood on which she and her family depend.  Her son John is away at school, but teenage Bess, who is wilful and impulsive, is a problem.  She is deeply attached to her father, and is still clinging to his careless promises to take her away to sea to become a surgeon like him.

But Mary has another reason to be disappointed by Lemuel’s unwelcome return.  She married the wrong bloke, and the right one, Richard, is still part of her life.  While never compromising her virtue, he has loved her and supported the family through all its travails.  When Lemuel was thought to be dead, there was a prospect of a happier life, and it was only Mary’s determination to be independent that stood in the way.  [And the seven years requirement before there can be a  ‘presumption of death’?]

Added to these domestic complications is the presence of a serial rapist who makes it risky for a midwife to be out and about at night, and a thread about the competition from surgeons wanting to medicalise childbirth.  The author note in the back of the book plays the gender card in noting that ‘male practitioners’ reinforced the stereotyping of midwives while promoting their own efforts to ‘medicalise’ childbirth.  This is not the place to discuss a complex issue, which is still characterised by turf wars muddied by failures of outdated practices on both sides, but I hope that readers don’t just digest the message from this novel, to extrapolate a false narrative from it about contemporary practice.

Because, as Laura Helmoth concludes in her article about this issue at Slate, the medicalisation of childbirth has made it safer for mother and baby:

… when you take a world-historical look at childbirth, it’s not midwives and cozy home births that get credit for making maternal death such an unthinkable outcome today. One of the great victories of modern times is that childbirth doesn’t need to be natural, and neither does the maternal death rate. It’s modern medicine for the win. (Laura Helmoth, American science journalist and the editor in chief of Scientific American, viewed at Slate.com 3/12/22).

Yes, I feel strongly about this, for reasons I choose to keep to myself.

Image Credits:

Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift, Edited for Young Readers, Junior Deluxe Editions, Doubleday 1956, illustrations by Leonard Wesigard (1916-2000).  Do visit Weisgard’s webpage, an homage created by his children. I have a set of these Junior Deluxe Editions, and two more of them were illustrated by Weisgard:  Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Andersen’s Fairy Tales, (which by the inscription in a childish hand I seem to have treasured since I was six years old.)

Author: Lauren Chater
Title: Gulliver’s Wife
Publisher: Simon and Schuster (Australia), 2020
Cover design: Christabella Designs, cover image by Magdalena Wasiczek/Trevillion Images
ISBN: 9781925596380, pbk., 404 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from Blarney Books and Art, Port Fairy, $32.99