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Searching... Silver Falls Library | FIC MCGILL | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Vivid, mysterious and unforgettable, The Butterfly Cabinet is Bernie McGill's engrossing portrayal of the dark history that intertwines two lives. Inspired by a true story of the death of the daughter of an aristocratic Irish family at the end of the nineteenth century, McGill powerfully tells this tale of two women whose lives will become upended by a newly told secret.
The events begin when Maddie McGlade, a former nanny now in her nineties, receives a letter from the last of her charges and realizes that the time has come to unburden herself of a secret she has kept for over seventy years: what really happened on the last day in the life of Charlotte Ormond, the four-year-old only daughter of the big house where Maddie was employed as a young woman. It is to Charlotte's would-be niece, Anna--pregnant with her first--that Maddie will tell her story as she nears the end of her life in a lonely nursing home in Northern Ireland.
The book unfolds in chapters that alternate between Maddie's story and the prison diaries of Charlotte's mother, Harriet, who had been held responsible for her daughter's death. As Maddie confesses the truth to Anna, she unravels the Ormonds' complex family history, and also details her own life, marked by poverty, fear, sacrifice and lies. In stark contrast to Maddie is the misunderstood, haughty and yet surprisingly lyrical voice of Harriet's prison diaries, which Maddie has kept hidden for decades. Motherhood came no more easily to Harriet than did her role as mistress of a far-flung Irish estate. Proud and uncompromising, she is passionate about riding horses and collecting butterflies to store in her prized cabinet. When her only daughter, Charlotte, dies, allegedly as the result of Harriet's punitive actions, the community is quick to condemn her and send her to prison for the killing. Unwilling to stoop to defend herself and too absorbed in her own world of strict rules and repressed desires, she accepts the cruel destiny that is beyond her control even as, paradoxically, it sets her free.
The result of this unusual duet is a haunting novel full of frightening silences and sorrowful absences that build toward the unexpected, chilling truth.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Based loosely on a late-19th-century Irish murder case, McGill turns her gothic debut about the death of a young girl tied up alone in a room as punishment into an exquisite series of painful revelations. In the late 1960s, the pregnant Anna visits her old nurse, Maddie, who four decades before was a housemaid at the Castle at Oranmore. As Maddie reminisces, the viewpoint shifts between Maddie and her harsh employer, butterfly-collector Harriet Ormond, imprisoned in 1892 for the murder (accidental death, she claimed) of her four-year-old daughter, Charlotte, and later pregnant again with a daughter who would become Anna's mother. With the butterflies, pinned and displayed, serving as metaphor for the constricted lives of both Harriet's tightly disciplined children and Harriet herself, trapped in motherhood and frustrated by the unruly young Charlotte, McGill easily recreates the lives of the Castle's owners and servants and the intricate connections between them. As both Harriet and Maddie's stories emerge, the tale becomes a powder keg of domestic suspense that threatens to explode as long-kept secrets surrounding Charlotte's death are teased out. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Like an IrishUpstairs Downstairsbut much darker, McGill's first novel examines the events surrounding a child's death in 1892 from the point of view of both her aristocratic mother and a young housemaid.The premise of the novel, based on an actual case, is straightforward: Harriet Ormond, the mistress of Oranmore, locks her 4-year-old daughter Charlotte in a wardrobe room with her hands tied as punishment for soiling herself; when Harriet unlocks the door three hours later, Charlotte has asphyxiated; Harriet is charged with killing her child. Seventy years later, Ornamore has become a nursing home where Harriet's granddaughter Annie visits Maddie McGlade, a former Ormond servant. Maddie gives Annie the diary Harriet kept during her year in prison and tells her own secret memories. Shifting between Maddie's version of events and Harriet's, the novel gives a broad picture of the politics and socio-economic realities of late 19th-century Northern Ireland (the Ormonds are Catholic landowners in favor of Home Rule) while offering an intricate, in-depth character study of Harriet's tortured soul. Talk about Tiger momsas the diary begins, it is hard to feel sympathy for such a harsh, seemingly unfeeling woman, and certainly that is how Maddie judges her mistress. But the diary gradually reveals Harriet's complexity. Having felt unloved as a child, she is devoted to her own children and her thoughtful, well-meaning husband Edward. But she lacks imagination and flexibility. A frazzled young mother of nine running a huge estate on a shoestring, she feels duty-bound to be strict. Jealous of her charming, well-educated younger sister Julia, who has come to live at Oranmore after their parents' deaths, Harriet knows and secretly relies on the fact that Julia regularly circumvents her punishments. When she locks Charlotte in the wardrobe, she assumes Julia will unlock the door to care for her. But as Maddie's story unfolds it becomes obvious that Harriet has less control over life than she thinks.An emotionally bracing, refreshingly intelligent and ultimately heartbreaking story.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
It begins with Anna's letter to her former nanny. You had a story for me. . . . I wasn't ready to hear it before but I am now. Maddie McGlade, 92, realizes this may be her last chance to share the secret that has burdened her for 70 years. In a kind of Gothic Upstairs/Downstairs, Maddie tells her tales of coming to work at Oranmore House in Northern Ireland in the early 1900s, of the gentle folk she worked with and their trials with love and class. Through the diary that Maddie found by accident, the tale of Harriet Ormond, the harsh, emotionless mistress of the house, is also told. Harriet relates her childhood mistreatment, her marriage troubles, and her puzzlement over everyone's criticism of her punishments of her eight children, even after said punishment caused the death of her youngest daughter. The intertwining of the family's woes and those of the staff, leading to a future neither could have foreseen, is played out against a backdrop of political and cultural upheaval. Chilling and gripping.--Dickie, Elizabet. Copyright 2010 Booklist