Jo Mazelis, The Forger’s Ink (Seren 2025)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/232616443-the-forger-s-ink
1816 Swansea. It’s October, and the summer has not come.
Orphaned Fanny Imlay is unloved in the house of her stepfather, who claims she ‘makes a luxury of her melancholy’. She writes of a fantasy world called Summerland where the sun always shines and all the people are happy—all but one girl who believes she was ‘born sad’ and weeps and weeps. The portrait of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft painted by John Opie, which hangs on the wall in the study, is destined never to glance in her direction. When her half-sisters run off with Percy Bysshe Shelley, they do not take her.
Years later in 1971 Helena is unloved, minding the bookshop while her absent, cruel husband is away. Jude walks in carrying papers she purports to be proof that Fanny did not, as history has written, commit suicide, the tragedy that was the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Jude, orphaned, has inherited Fisherman’s Cottage, where ghosts come up from the river ‘squelching and dripping, fish-nibbled and green with slimy weeds’. She meets the fun-loving couple Sigi and Olof. Olof teaches her how to make ink from oak galls, and Jude takes up writing again, inspired by the classics. She’s heart-broken when the couple move back to Sweden. She mourns the warmth of the manufactured family she enjoyed for scarce months the way Shelley’s monster watches the happy family with unrequited longing. Like the monster, Jude ‘pass[es] like a wraith through the world’.
The Gothic tone matches the Wollstonecraft-Shelley subject matter; the pace is languid. It takes Helena over 100 pages to understand what Jude’s papers are (it’s really her husband who knows books).
Mysterious and beautiful, if heart-rending, it fully explores the emotions of isolation and sadness. We feel the profound melancholy of Fanny and Jude, even Helena.
This review first appeared in Historical Novels Review.
Susie Helme 