Joel H. Morris's debut novel All Our Yesterdays explores the life of Lady Macbeth and wrestles with one of Shakespeare's lingering mysteries.
Publishing has always been fascinated by retellings and the idea of looking at familiar stories through new or more complicated lenses. The rise of the feminist retelling in recent years has been especially welcome, stories explicitly aimed at reevaluating and reassessing some of Western literature’s most famous and foundational tales by putting the oft-ignored and frequently villainized women at their centers.
The popularity of Greek mythological retellings in recent years means we’ve seen stories featuring infamous female characters ranging from, but if 2024 is any indication, it looks as though William Shakespeare’s women are about to get their turn in the spotlight. Joel H. Morris’sthe story of Lady Macbeth, but also her son, the mysterious absent child that literary critics and English majors have speculated about for years but who doesn’t appear in Shakespeare’s original text.
The alternating perspectives allow us to see the pair’s difficult home life, as the Boy is frequently mocked and beaten for being too womanish and emotional and the Lady does her best to teach him to be a man strong enough to survive in a world that looks down upon those it deems as too weak or feminine.
Morris’s novel offers an entertaining enough prequel to the Scottish play, full of gorgeous prose, rich descriptions, and a welcome expansion of multiple secondary characters like Macduff and Banquo. The glimpse into the Macbeths’ marriage—a partnership that seems a genuinely happy love match in this retelling—is also welcome, and a bittersweet precursor to the dark days we know still lie in front of them.keeps its central character at something like arm’s length.
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