Marilyn Pemberton, A Keeper of Tales (Williams & Whiting 2022)
Harriet is a female student at Oxford in 1885. Their stern chaperone warns her against making any waves. They live at a boarding home for lower-income students, where they are joined by haughty Lady Victoria, daughter of Lord Somerset, who wants to live with ‘ordinary’ people.
She meets, chaperoned by Mrs Croft, with her brother Bertie and her second cousin Edward.
Harriet writes stories, like the ones she heard from her grandma Glizzy—Lizzie from Book 1 The Teller of Tales—and Lady Victoria, Vee, offers to illustrate them. The narrative is interspersed with Harriet’s stories, all about girls asserting independence, being the heroines in their own lives.
Harriet and Vee are strong characters, and their friendship and their conflicts make for interesting reading. Vee’s aristocratic haughtiness renders her, on the surface, unlikeable, yet she has some deep pain that we are keen to uncover, and we are sympathetic to her rage at the limitations society places on women. They have to dress as men even to enter the library, an act of rebellion which results in their expulsion.
They are happily taken under Aunt Augusta’s wing. Vee and Edward compete for Harriet’s affections. Harriet discovers there are worse fates for women than being denied an Oxbridge education, and yet she finds love in the end.
This is Book 2 in the Grandmothers’ Footsteps series, I have read Book 1. Book 3 is expected soon. This one is told in the same first person present tense of story-telling and treats the same theme of female empowerment. As Harriet says, ‘Maybe it’s time for women to lose their femininity and just become human.’
I received an ARC from the author.
Susie Helme 
Leave a comment