Emma Donoghue's next book is a historical novel about a secret romance for the ages — read an excerpt now
Learned by Heart is a finalist for the $60K Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
Learned by Heart is the latest novel by bestselling author Emma Donoghue. The novel draws on years of research and the five-million-word secret journal of British diarist Anne Lister — dubbed by many as "the first modern lesbian."
It tells the long-buried story of the romance between Lister, a brilliant young troublemaker and Eliza Raine, an orphan heiress banished to England from India.
The two meet at a boarding school for girls called the Manor School for Young Ladies when they are fourteen and fall dangerously in love as their lives become entangled.
Donoghue is an Irish Canadian writer whose books include the novels Landing, Room, Frog Music, The Wonder, The Pull of the Stars and the children's book The Lotterys Plus One. Room was an international bestseller and was adapted into a critically acclaimed film starring Brie Larson.
Donoghue is going on a Canada-wide book tour in the fall. You can check out the tour dates below.
Learned by Heart is a finalist for the $60,000 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. You can read an excerpt below.
My dear Lister,
Last night I went to the Manor again. I open the door here — I don't delay even to pick up a cape — and step out across the village green. My shoes write inscrutable, fleeting messages on the dewy grass. When I reach the moon- marked road, all I have to do is follow it. In less than a quarter of an hour, at the walls of York, where Bootham Bar has been arching for 800 years, here's that antique hodgepodge, King's Manor, hiding our school behind its redbrick face.
The great medieval door with its lion and unicorn opens at my touch, and I find myself in the scented courtyard. I turn right to enter the Manor School itself, where three generations of one family have watched over the better-born daughters of the North. I walk invisible from one familiar, ramshackle room to the next. Through the kitchen and pantry, refectory and offices, and up the footworn stone stairs I float. Through the classrooms on the first floor. Into the north wing, past the mistresses' chambers, and up again, to the second- floor attic. Past Cook's room, then the one the four maids share, then the box room full of trunks and portmanteaus. The fourth door is the Slope's, and it springs open to my fingertips.
You'll understand my wishful fancy; I pay this visit, in fact all these tender nightly visits, in my mind's eye only. In the flesh, I've not passed the lion and unicorn and entered our school in eight years. These days of course I'm prevented, thwarted by circumstances beyond my control.
But last year, or in any of the intervening years since I left, although I often passed the lovely old silhouette of King's Manor, somehow — careless, unthinking — I never thought to knock on that ancient door. Eliza, I ask myself now, why didn't you go back while you still could?
For the rest of my life, I believe, I'll be transported back in dreams to memory's private theatre, where our girl selves still move and chat and laugh.
You won't be surprised that I so treasure these old haunts. It was in York that I received my education; where I was stamped like warm wax by a seal, formed once and for all. I know you'll recall the song — where all the joy and mirth, made this town heaven on earth. At the Manor School, I tasted heaven on earth even as I toiled to pack my poor skull with the knowledge and wisdom I was told I'd need for life. The joke is, Lister, the only lesson I learned, or at least the only lesson I remember, was you.
We two were so young — had barely seen the change of fourteen years, as Capulet says of his daughter. Less than a twelvemonth the pair of us spent under our Slope's slanted ceiling, but there are fleeting times in life, especially in youth, that shine out more strongly than all the rest and will never fade: veins of gold in dull rock. For the rest of my life, I believe, I'll be transported back in dreams to memory's private theatre, where our girl selves still move and chat and laugh.
These days I live on words, since my imagination is starved of other stimuli. Not that I keep a diary. The year we turned seventeen, you did your best to teach me that improving habit, but I always found it hard to pluck details from my daily round that seemed worth recording. Without an interested ear inclined towards me, my words dry up; I lack that bottomless spring that bubbles up behind your clever tongue. It strikes me that your own journal- writing has much in common with your other powers — walking, say. Whatever you like, you do with energy and ambition, almost greedily, and with a vigour that impresses us lesser mortals, even if we sometimes find it exhausting.
No, only in letters to one sympathetic listener can I open my bosom and speak my pleasures and pains. So I read all day until my eyes are sore, then write to you, though all too hurriedly — two or three pages' worth, I find, is about as much as I can get out under these conditions — before I'm obliged to lay down my pen.
In the night I send out my mind to roam, and of all the places I've lived in my almost quarter century (Madras, Tottenham, Doncaster, Halifax, Bristol), the lodestone to which my restless mind is always drawn, as a compass needle to true north, is York — and in particular to our Manor School. Less than a mile in distance from this house where I sit scribbling, but in time, a yawning gulf: 10 years back, to when we were 14. And not just any 10 years but that vast stretch between raw girlhood and settled womanhood.
The memories come back to me with the irresistible force of waves striking a shore. It would be absurd to deny how changed I am; in ways I need not list, I am not what I was when we met.
Like some old lady, at 24, I find most fascination in retrospect. The memories come back to me with the irresistible force of waves striking a shore. It would be absurd to deny how changed I am; in ways I need not list, I am not what I was when we met. But I recall that Eliza so vividly, I only have to close my eyes to slip into her, under her skin. Under the mossy, leaky roof of King's Manor, I was quickened to life from the day I first laid eyes on you, Lister. As the old Roman chiselled on our stone, Happy the spirit of this place.
In our Slope I passed my best hours, and sometimes I have to remind myself that they are indeed past. But I tell myself that I'm not dead, not yet. Wilted plants have been known to revive if given just a little water. Could I have you by my side once more, I almost believe.
Adapted and excerpted from Learned by Heart by Emma Donoghue, published by HarperCollins Canada. Copyright © 2023 Emma Donoghue. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Canada. All rights reserved.
Emma Donoghue's Canadian tour dates
- Aug. 27: Stratford, Ont. I Stratford Festival
- Aug. 29: London, Ont. I London Public Library Wolf Performance Hall
- Sept. 6: Oakville, Ont. I Oakville Centre for the Performing Arts
- Sept. 10: Eden Mill, Ont. | Eden Mills Writers Festival
- Sept. 12: Kitchener, Ont. I Kitchener Public Library
- Sept. 25: Toronto I Toronto Public Library
- Sept. 26: Toronto I Toronto International Festival of Authors
- Sept. 27: Kingston, Ont. | Kingston Writers Festival
- Oct. 13-15: Calgary | Calgary Wordfest's Imaginarium Festival
- Oct. 16: Winnipeg | McNally Robinson
- Oct. 17: Victoria | Bolen Books
- Oct. 18-22: Vancouver | Vancouver Writers Fest
- Oct. 28: Uxbridge, Ont. | Book Drunkard Literary Festival, Blue Heron Books
- Oct. 29: Ottawa | Ottawa International Writers Festival
- Nov. 5-6: Halifax | Afterwords Literary Festival
