The year is 1805 and 14-year-old Eliza Raine — the orphaned daughter of a white British father and an Indian mother — has been uprooted from her home in Madras and deposited by her guardian at the Manor School for Young Ladies in York, England. Life at the dilapidated institution can be brutal; windows must stay closed, the heat is restricted and days are spent trying to adhere to an unimaginably long list of rules that trap the girls in an endless circle of punishment and penance. When the brilliant and rebellious Anne Lister, also 14, shows up, Raine’s staid, routine existence is turned completely upside down. Of Lister she says: “She’d have bitten into the fruit before the Serpent ever slithered to offer it up.” The two begin a secret and dangerous love affair after being forced to live together in the boarding school’s garret. 

With devastating detail, Learned by Heart serves up the soaring joy and bottomless aches of first love, the sloppy passions of girls discovering their bodies, and how love can build up a person’s spirit only to end up ripping it apart. The story of how Raine and Lister went from reluctant friends to lovers unfolds in two timelines: the first while they are together at the school and, 10 years later — told entirely through Raine’s increasingly erratic letters to Lister, written from an asylum — as the pair’s relationship is slowly revealed to be the cause of Raine’s undoing.

 

 

Donoghue, the bestselling author of Room, The Wonder and Haven, is no stranger to historical fiction. And in Learned by Heart, backed by mountains of research, she imagines the early lives of Lister, whose exploits would later become the stuff of legend, and Raine, who, to this day, is still mostly unknown.

For inspiration, Donoghue dug deep into the journals of Lister, often referred to as “the first modern lesbian,” whose five million-word diaries (some of which are written in code) are the bread and butter of scholars and historians. Lister, often referred to as “Gentlemen Jack” for her manly appearance and predilection for only wearing black, was wonderfully portrayed in the 2019 BBC-TV series of the same name, but it was Raine’s story that most fascinated Donoghue, so the author used her imagination to bring what little is known about her into the light.

Donoghue spoke to Zed from her home in London, Ont., about the decades-long journey to bring this story to life, the responsibility that comes with fictionalizing historical figures and the challenge of writing a good sex scene.

Kisha Ferguson: I admit that when I first started reading the book, I didn’t know that it was based on a true story. But, honestly, it’s been a long time since a book broke my heart. The story is incredible. 

Emma Donoghue: I’m so, so touched to hear that.

KF: What fascinated you about the story of Eliza and Anne in the first place?

ED: I think I found the idea of exceptionality or oddity so interesting, because Anne Lister was very unusual in that she gloried in how different she was. In her diary, there are moments of self-consciousness, but mostly she’s like, ‘I am unique in the world.’ Eliza, in her letters, sounds much more conventionally girlish and afraid of conflict. And I thought, how interesting to mull over these two who were both oddballs in different ways and who ended up stuck together in this attic room. 

KF: It was so touching, too, when you had them say, “we invented love.” Their story has fascinated you for 25 years; almost the entire expanse of your writing career. How have your ideas about them changed over the course of time? 

ED: I held off on writing the book until I was sure which book I wanted to write, because there are many ways you could come at this. I suspect if I wrote this book earlier on, I would’ve been more focused on Anne Lister. But I’m more interested in Eliza now. I got more and more intrigued by Eliza’s perspective on Regency society and by the unspoken — what’s not in the records. So, even when I began writing the novel, I thought I would probably toggle between their two points of view, because I love doing that in fiction. But I found that the Anne Lister sections were not interesting. In terms of being in their minds, it was all Eliza. 

KF: In your extensive research, was there anything that you came across that you didn’t feel like you could put in the book, or that you chose to exclude?

ED: I have not represented the four additional decades that Eliza would spend in those asylums. Anne regularly visited her, so there’s lots of little references, like “dropped by to see Eliza, still no better, refused to speak to me,” or “was in a straight jacket.” I don’t know how to make fiction out of those four decades. So all I could try to do was represent Eliza in the asylum at the beginning, still semi-rational. With all my historical fiction, I give huge author’s notes at the end, because I want to add to the communal project of digging up these obscure lives. I decided to take a very narrow slice of the year they met, and then 10 years later to show Eliza in the asylum. But it doesn’t begin to cover her long life.

KF: Does that mean there could potentially be a sequel to Learned by Heart?

ED: I’m not sure. It’s a genuine puzzle to me. How you represent the inner life of somebody who’s mad. I think one thing I was trying to capture in the fictional letters that I wrote in the 1815 sections were the sheer surges of emotion. There are times when Eliza is very sort of grandiose and slightly megalomaniac. And there are times when she’s very self-hating and depressed. But the experience of somebody in a straight jacket … it might be beyond my reach. 

KF: The way you captured the manor so vividly, it was very much its own character in the book. You felt the cold and the damp and the absolute repressiveness there. 

ED: It’s the balance between happy and sad. The school is, in many ways, a bit like a prison, and there are some bad times there, but there are joyful times there. I’m not sure where to find the joy in the asylum. And, of course, on many of these topics, I felt like I’m writing way beyond my own experience; in everything from writing a woman of colour to writing somebody in the throes of mental illness. I’m used to the challenge of writing about somebody centuries before my life, but in other ways I kind of get the willies about ‘am I gonna mess this up?’ So, I really wrote this book in a spirit of, ‘I’m doing my best, but please let me get her right.’ I feel a real ethical obligation when I’m talking about a real person like Eliza Raine, who has been so actively forgotten.

KF: How heavy is the responsibility to get it right?

ED: There are a lot of points where you have to make some kind of judgement call. For instance, some people would very much blame Anne Lister and say she broke her girlfriend’s heart and left her in the asylum, or even perhaps stuck her in the asylum. And from all my meticulous research, I would have to say there’s no evidence that anybody put Eliza in the asylum. She went there voluntarily. But, of course, I’m showing Anne Lister moving on with her life and getting over it in a way that Eliza couldn’t. There are moments when my judgement might seem to fall one way or another, and I really tremble over these moments. I never want to create some idealized portrait. But, I also want to really honour these dead people. 

KF: So how do you move beyond that?

ED: You just do more work. It’s no accident that this one took me so long to write. I kept waiting to see if more would emerge about the facts of Eliza Raine’s life. I didn’t want to wholesale invent Eliza’s past, because it’s too important to me. And in the absence of a full biography, her life is an important thing that I don’t want to just casually fictionalize. It was quite delicate work of working within the known facts, like, I suppose, patching a very tattered cloth.

KF: If Anne Lister didn’t exist in real life, I think you would have to invent her. What do you think of the real-life Lister?

ED: I’m charmed by her, overall. I find her qualities quite endearing, because she’s so brilliant and self-educated, and high speed in every way: walked fast, wrote fast, did everything fast. It is very attractive, when combined with how vulnerable she could be. The fact that, in her diary, she’s fretting over things like her shabby clothes and will her girlfriend go off and marry a man. But then she’s outrageously snobbish and judgmental. I have to admit, I gave her a couple of incidents from my own teenage years. I was nicknamed Dictionary Donoghue, for instance, so I decided Ann Lister would be nicknamed Lexicon Lister. Or the moment when she calls her fellow students ignorami. I, on my first day in secondary school, in a jokey way, used the word ignorami and I never lived it down. With historical fiction, you quite often use autobiographical material.

KF: Would you say you could relate to one of them more than the other?

ED: Probably to Ann Lister more easily, but that made Eliza so interesting to me. I found her much more psychologically mysterious. I’ve never been to a therapist. I’m very consistently happy and energetic and always writing or something. And so Eliza’s much murkier world of ups and downs and melancholy and nostalgia and regret and longing, that was more unfamiliar to me. I’m much more intrigued by the challenge of getting into the head of somebody who’s really not me. 

KF: Let’s talk about the sex scenes in the book. They’re beautifully written. And there was that one line: “… the varieties of stickiness, the hard push of velvet to bone.” I don’t think I’ve really ever read something in fiction that doesn’t make me cringe. How hard are sex scenes to write?

ED: Oh, they’re so hard. They’re so hard. You go over them three or four times, whereas in another scene you might just draft once and it’s fine. The velvet and bone reference, I’m sure that’s influenced by a May Sarton poem about sex in old age. I don’t put sex scenes in all my books. But, in this case, it’s completely relevant because it’s this whole new world opening up. And also, if they are running risks, we have to see what’s the motivation, especially for someone like Eliza, who’s more trying to follow convention. We need to see her pulled across that line.

KF: Both The Wonder and Room were adapted into films. Can you see this book being adapted for the big screen?

ED: I’d be extremely open to that. But every film is a collaboration, that’s one thing I love about writing for film. Unlike the world of fiction where I pick every word, film is shaped by those you choose to work with. In a spirit of collaboration, I can easily imagine a Learned by Heart film. Frankly, it has astonished me that Eliza Raine has not been written about in fiction until now. There are so many people making up fictional characters in something like Bridgerton, and I’m thinking, ‘Eliza Raine is right there. Why is nobody taking an interest?’ 

KF: Why do you think that is?

ED: It could be that Anne Lister studies have been its own little kind of cluster. But quite a lot of attention has been paid to Anne Lister’s other girlfriends who were far less interesting in terms of their position in British societies. It could be people, like myself, not feeling qualified. Or, maybe it’s a sort of tentativeness. Anne Lister studies have been full of white people like me. So maybe there’s been a kind of a feeling of like, ‘Ooh, don’t know how to write about Eliza.’ And, you know, that’s still true. I wouldn’t say I’m the most qualified at all. I just really wanted there to be a book about her.