Learned by Heart by Emma Donoghue

“Some eighty years ago, our mother’s parents founded the School here to train up wives and mothers worthy of the sacred charge of forming the next generation. How glorious a time this is for the education of girls!”

This quote is from early in Emma Donoghue’s novel Learned by Heart.  Set in the 1800’s this is the story of two schoolgirls, over the years 1805 to 1815. Eliza Raine and Anne Lister meet in 1805 as boarders at a girl’s school, King’s Manor, near York, England 

Eliza is “a young lady of colour” whose mother was East Indian, her father a British military man. Their daughters Eliza and Jane, shipped off to England to be educated. Anne Lister is one of a large family, a daughter who is largely self-taught, confiedent, and very, very intelligent, with an aptitude that enables her to learn easily and is already knowledgeable beyond her years. The girls are in Middle School, 14 years old, more or less. We meet their classmates and learn of their histories, giving the reader a picture of life for these girls in this time and place. We also learn what is going on in the world as the girls hear it – Bonaparte defeated at Cape Trafalgar, and later his victories in Europe. We learn about what was considered modern medicine in the early 1800s.

But it is Eliza and Anne who are the centre of the story. Anne who calls herself “Lister” and honours Eliza by calling her “Raine”, as young men would do.

This is a novel about class, race, friendship, love. About girls and women, intelligence, education. As they are taught social skills, appropriate behaviour, dancing lessons, music, drawing – these girls are being trained for marriage.

Emma Donoghue is a writer who with each novel presents us with something completely different than the one before – always surprising and inventive. Learned by Heart is again such a story.

It is also a novel based on real people and their experience. Emma Donoghue writes “I’ve been obsessed with the puzzling and tragic fate of Anne Lister’s first lover, Eliza Raine, since writing my first play, back in 1990, which was a very loose adaptation of Helena Whitbread’s first book of selections, I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister, 1791-1840. This long-brewing novel, Learned by Heart, brings Eliza and Lister together, at 14, at the Manor School in York.”