Paths forward

A well-researched historical début

Rose Lucas

House of Longing

by Tara Calaby Text Publishing $32.99 pb, 416 pp

Tara Calaby’s début novel, based on her doctoral studies, wears its clearly extensive research lightly as it weaves an engrossing story of a young woman’s struggle in 1890s Melbourne towards something a contemporary reader might call social, emotional, and sexual independence. Focused around the story of an individual, House of Longing also traverses a broad canvas of social issues – class, gender roles, attitudes to mental health and its treatment, the importance of friendship, and the possibilities of sexual love between women.

Charlotte Ross is a seemingly unlikely champion of such a paradigm shift. Unassuming, she is initially happy to live quietly with her father and to work in his stationery shop in Elizabeth Street. Her aspiration is to avoid marriage and to continue with the satisfactions of work under the auspices of a loving father. However, two cataclysmic events occur that disrupt the easy opportunities of that path: first, she makes an intense attachment with her friend Flora and is immediately catapulted into the intoxication of that attraction and its confronting implications; and second, she finds herself abruptly without the structure of support, her future bleak and uncertain.

In a current era of queer rights, the ‘coming out’ story might be said to have lost something of its cachet and certainly its shock value, given that love between any individuals is largely a socially acceptable and understood potential within the wide gamut of human experience. However, as in Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith (2002) or Hannah Kent’s Devotion (2021), the historical novel provides a new opportunity to revisit and perhaps reappraise that highly charged narrative of a desire that emerges from a place of apparent social and personal impossibility. In other words, what on earth did Charlotte’s topsy-turvy feelings in response to her friend actually mean, and how could she make sense of them? Where could they possibly lead her? The lack of an apparent direction forward serves to highlight the intensity of such insistent if bewildering desires, giving Calaby the potential for a ‘passion on the edge’ story – all the more eroticised because the contemporary reader is well aware of where all this over-heatedness is heading. In this sense, I was reminded of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series’ ability to keep the reader on a similar charged edge in a circumstance (in that instance, falling in love with a vampire) in which sex seems both impossible and yet utterly compelling.

There are two main threads in House of Longing: Charlotte’s journey to understand her feelings for Flora and her concomitant efforts to make her way in the world as independently as possible; and, closely related, her encounters with the treatment of women who were deemed to be ‘insane’. Caught herself in a terrible vortex of loss, Charlotte’s ‘excessive’ emotions result in her crossing a line of feminine propriety, and she finds herself confined in the Kew Lunatic Asylum, ostensibly being cared for in the context of its rudimentary nineteenth-century therapeutics.

Like other ‘houses’ in Charlotte’s experience – the sanctuary of her father’s shop, Flora’s family’s grand home, or the house in East Melbourne she shares with her doctor husband – Kew Asylum is a microcosm of its society. Not dissimilar to Mary Wollstonecraft’s devastating portrayal of the experience of the woman whom society labelled as ‘mad’ in her Vindication of the Rights of Women, Kew perpetuates class structures (where Charlotte operates in an interstitial category as a woman of means but also the daughter of a shopkeeper), as well as the dominance of male authority. The women suffer from, and are judged for, what might be generalised as an excess of ‘feminine’ emotion – grief, melancholia, anger, senility, impertinence, mania, or unregulated sexuality. Once they have been so classified, it becomes extremely difficult to convince the hospital authorities otherwise – unless, like Charlotte, it is possible for them to enlist powerful friends from the outside. However, despite the suffocating weight of such a system, Charlotte finds a surprising comfort in the other women she meets there. Friendships are forged across the erstwhile barriers of class, and compassion for other people’s troubles lifts Charlotte’s perspective beyond her own losses. In the context of that surprising camaraderie, Charlotte begins to operate from a position of agency that does finally seem to offer her a path forward.

One of the ever-present risks in writing historical fiction is the danger of bringing an ahistorical view to its events and narrative trajectories. Calaby seems well aware of this risk and generally treads carefully around the temptation to bring her central character to a modern conclusion that might see her eschew her reliance on men altogether, and allow her to find domestic and sexual contentment with another woman. The resolution that might be possible in 2023 is clearly not possible in 1890s Melbourne, but that doesn’t mean that House of Longing isn’t able to prefigure it, and maybe literally to evoke a longing for it. In creating a resilient character such as Charlotte – who survives her own trials and comes to find an enriched way of understanding both herself and others around her – Calaby’s novel is both realistic and hopeful. Houses can be places of confinement as much as places of shelter, and although it might be possible to be sometimes ‘unhoused’ from social expectation, ultimately, like all of us, each of Calaby’s characters will need to find their own versions of a sustainable ‘accommodation’. g

Rose Lucas’s most recent collection is Increments of the Everyday (Puncher & Wattmann, 2022).