'Room' novelist Emma Donoghue on the historical queer romance — and the personal schoolgirl love affair — that inspired her novel 'Learned by Heart.'
The author of “Room” had planned to publish “The Pull of the Stars,” about a Dublin nurse battling the Spanish Flu, in 2021. Along came coronavirus.Lister, a precocious tomboy who seemingly knows something about everything, and Raine, a half-Indian heiress born out of wedlock, were fellow outcasts who found each other at the Manor School in 1805. Their first love left Lister emboldened, while its premature end left Raine devastated.
For Donoghue, who poured her usual volumes of research into the novel, Lister proved fine company. But Raine was the real revelation. “Lots more people have heard of Lister than was true even five years ago,” Donoghue says over video from her home in London, Canada. “In the wonderful ‘Gentleman Jack’ series, she’s a really vivid character in her 40s, and more and more of her work is being transcribed and published. But Eliza remains this truly mysterious figure, and she’s so interesting.
When they first meet in the novel, Raine is a little puzzled by her new friend. “I’m rather an enigma even to myself,” Lister tells her. “Nature was in a funny mood the day she made me. Perhaps I’m the connecting link between the sexes.” Soon, however, Raine grows enchanted. As Donoghue writes, “What’s between them grows like a creeper that covers the ugliest bricks and drainpipes in living green.
Donoghue depicts this youthful affair as an all-consuming force, hidden among the regimented lessons and strict propriety of the school. From the start, she lets us know Raine won’t emerge unscathed, mixing in desperate letters written later from an asylum among the present-tense ecstasy of the relationship. “I was only 14 when I first tasted that intoxicating draught,” Raine writes Lister in one missive, “and I must have drunk too deep.
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