Historical Novel Year of Wonders

Geraldine Brooks’ historical novel Year of Wonders portrays the manner in which the way the town’s people of Eyam view themselves and their beliefs is permanently altered by the calamity of the Plague. Individuals are evicted from their comfort zones and are uncomprisingly placed into the gruelling catastrophe of the plague. In the face of this contagion the villagers are plunged into despair and fear and the strangeness of the contagion compels the people of Eyam to change and develop, some of which resorting to irrational hysteria and others strengthened and made strong. There are those who gain and those who lose in the face of adversity and these changes in the characters highlight the true effect, which the misfortune has on them.

Anna Frith, the protagonist and narrator of Year of Wonders, is portrayed in the beginning of the novel as a ‘scrawny sapling’, and is both a maid and servant of the Bradford’s and a maid for the rector. For Anna the plague brings incredible loss and grief, with the loss of her two sons Jamie and Tom and her husband Sam.

She mourns the loss of the life she had imagined for herself as a wife and a mother. ‘I can’t’, she reflects, ‘say that I even feel what it felt like, when I was happy’. At points, her loneliness overwhelms her, for she began to ‘fear the line between myself and madness is as fine as a cobweb’. However, this grief also becomes a catalyst for her change. She is able to overcome her grief because of the fundamentally different understanding she has of the world. She puts aside her fright and is transformed through her work with the villagers, by making remedies with Elinor Mompellion, the rector’s wife, to assist them through the plague. This hidden strength from within her emerges and she uses the tragedy to strengthen herself and grow in her independence, and more significantly, her confidence. She shows her strengths in many instances; when she defends Mem Gowdie against