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JOSEPHINE AND HARRIET
by Betty Burton
HarperCollins, October 2004
384 pages
6.99GBP
ISBN: 0007192630


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Now here's an oddity: a crime story in which all but one of the main characters and the large majority of the secondary characters are intelligent, likeable and honourable people, people one could only be pleased to have populating one's own life. At the same time -- I am almost tempted to say, "Nevertheless" -- this story ticks along enticingly and kept me up reading far into the night.

The title characters are two young women in London in the early 1870s. They are of an age, but inhabit very different worlds. Harriet is a music-hall singer when she can manage to get work, a sweet and outgoing girl from Norfolk who was 'taken advantage of' while in service and abandoned to make her own way in the big city.

We get a brief but telling glimpse of her early family life, then meet her again, scraping along as best she can, with a comfortable circle of friends and a (barely) decent place to live, but very close to the edge of utter penury. She is by no means a prostitute by trade, yet Harriet and her world casually accept the reality that sometimes a woman's body is her only meal ticket. And on one occasion, she makes a catastrophically bad choice.

Josephine is from the upper reaches of the growing Victorian middle class. Raised in a thoughtful, caring, rather 'advanced' family, she uses the confidence such an upbringing has given her to do as many such others have done and move 'advanced' another step along. She lives a bohemian life that rather worries her family but exhilarates her. With talent and determination, she has managed to gain a precarious foothold in the world of journalism and burns with ambition. She gets an early scoop on Harriet's story, then gradually gets drawn in to the attempt to solve first the question of her death, and then the larger questions of how she came to be who and where she was.

Harriet, her killer, and several other people in this story, including the two policemen, were real people. Burton does a fine job of bringing them to life. I had a few quibbles with the text -- the word for a person living outside his country is expatriate, for example, not ex-patriot, which conveys quite the wrong impression. There were a few -- only two or three -- places where I found the sentence structure so convoluted I had to re-read a passage several times, then shrug and go on. And why, for heaven's sake, is the author's name in large red type on the cover, and the book's title in much smaller black type below? I kept thinking the book was called Betty Burton.

That said, I do recommend this book. It gives the lie to the notion that good people, doing the best they can, are too dull to make interesting, indeed compelling, reading.

Reviewed by Diana Sandberg, November 2004

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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