God’s Children
Kate Marsden (1859-1931) was born in England and nursed in the Crimean War and New Zealand and learned about the impossibility of curing leprosy. She was determined not only to find a cure for this cruel disease, but to show the world how badly its sufferers were treated. Hearing of lepers exiled to the icy wastes of Siberia, she sought funds to travel to Russia to publicise their plight. She met Queen Victoria, which led to a meeting with Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia. She wrote of her arduous journey of 11,000 miles by train, sledge, horse, and boat in On Sledge and Horseback: To the Outcast Siberian Lepers.
Despite her incredible exploit, controversy dogged her all her life, and she was pursued by what we now called tabloid journalists. They questioned whether her mission was nothing more than a pleasure trip and that seeking a cure for leprosy was both foolish (in seeking a certain flower) and a lie. Not only that, but she was accused of embezzling the money given to her. Worse still, when Oscar Wilde’s trial and imprisonment had recently scandalised Victorian sensibilities, her admission of sexual relationships with women made her plans even harder to fulfil.
Did the consequences of her lesbianism make her identify with the ostracised lepers? In God’s Children, Mabli Roberts raises this possibility as she shows us a woman close to death who is visited by the women she has loved, her past triumphs and disasters and arguments with her detractors. Kate Marsden, while not immediately “likeable”, is an early feminist who struggled because while her love for women was not illegal, she was afraid it was a sin against her deeply-held Christian values. This novel is a fascinating account of the life of a pioneering woman.
