If it isn’t one prison, it’s another: Liberty Street by Heather Marshall

BY ELAINE O’CONNOR

Heather Marshall’s latest novel, Liberty Street (Ballantine, June 2026) explores the many meanings of imprisonment, the societal norms and expectations used to constrain women’s lives. During Marshall’s undergraduate history studies, a professor introduced her to Incorrigible (Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2004), the memoir of Velma Demerson, who was imprisoned in a Canadian reformatory because she was in a relationship with a man of Chinese nationality. Rediscovering the memoir years later, Marshall was inspired to explore the ways in which women’s behaviours and mental health have been and are defined against a male cultural and diagnostic framework.

Liberty Street explores how throughout history the mental health system has sought less to understand and treat, but to focus on controlling and punishing women, for what are considered their aberrant behaviours.

‘I wanted to write a story that took a snapshot of how women’s mental health has been treated over the years, and how, historically, women were punished for it,’ Marshall explains.

Moving between two separate, but connected timelines, that of investigative journalist Emily Radcliffe, carrying out an undercover investigation of the Mercer Women’s Prison in 1960s Toronto; and Detective Rachel Mackenzie, working in Ontario in 1996 to discover the identity of a ‘Jane Doe’, this complex novel explores both the definition and treatment of women’s mental health through history.  Detective Rachel Mackenzie is supported by a female forensic archaeologist, Sawyer. The main characters and movers in the novel are female, who though often undermined and unsupported by male superiors and colleagues, grasp the opportunity to uncover both the original scandal, and solve the long-neglected murder of a Mercer Women’s Prison inmate.

The themes of Liberty Street, while based firmly in a Canadian historical and social context, echo a growing international knowledge of how many state and church-managed institutions, supposedly established to support and help women, were simply means of exploitation and control. The design and regimes of these organisations were based in a patriarchal determination to control women’s reproductive rights and behaviour generally; and simultaneously connived to protect the social imperative of men’s rights to behave as they wished.

While women and girls were punished for becoming mothers outside marriage, men were rarely called to account for fathering ‘illegitimate’ offspring. No institutional framework existed within which male non-criminal behaviours towards female relatives or acquaintances were similarly punished or controlled.

author photo by Amanda Kopcic Photography and Videography

Marshall comments that her aim in all her writing is to “focus on a significant socio-political theme (or two) that has impacted women throughout history.”  The inmates of Mercer’s Women’s Prison are not only unmarried mothers, but prostitutes, disobedient wives and daughters, transgender individuals, pimps – any woman who does not comply with masculine societal norms. Dr Stone, the sadistic female prison doctor observes of the incarcerated women, “They are like animals,”, a definition that enables her to treat them in any way she sees fit.

Marshall’s first novel, Looking for Jane (Simon & Schuster, 2022) explored the Maternity Home system in Canada, similar to those operating in the USA, England and Australia; and most notoriously in the Magdalen Laundries in Ireland. Not only were women and girls forced into these punitive places, and made to give up their babies for “adoption”, but in the (so far) most notorious case, of the Sisters of Bon Secours home in Tuam, Co Galway, Ireland, 796 children and babies died and were disposed of in unmarked graves and the home’s sewers.

The Mercer Women’s Prison that symbolises these real-life institutions in Liberty Street is depicted as a place of horror, of mental and physical abuse and torture. Marshall says of the novel that ‘it’s an honour to help shine a light onto this heartbreaking part of our history’.  And that is all of our histories internationally, not just that of the Canadian women who are front and centre the focus of Marshall’s uncompromising and sensitive gaze. As Caroline Criado Perez observed in Invisible Women: Exploring Data Bias in a World designed for Men (Chatto & Windus, 2019) where the international medical world uses men’s needs and expectations to frame diagnoses and treatments, the reality of the mental and emotional health needs of women still goes either ignored or misunderstood.

In Emily Radcliffe, Marshall has created a heroine who stands easy comparison with Katniss Everdeen (The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins, Scholastic Press, 2008), Lisbeth Salander (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Norstedts Förlag, 2005) or Camille Preaker (Sharp Objects, Gillian Flynn, Crown Publishing House, 2006).  The Mercer Women’s Prison is a dystopia, but one centred in the reality of the historical Andrew Mercer Reformatory in Toronto. It illustrates with devastating accuracy how women were perceived, controlled and treated within punitive social systems that enabled and supported fathers and husbands in having daughters, sisters, wives, incarcerated for being ‘wayward’, a catch-all term for any behaviour of which men did not approve, as well as for pregnancy outside marriage. Emily is committed to the prison by her own father, also a journalist, not because he wishes to punish her, but because he is enabling her investigation.

Emily’s main adversary in the Mercer is the monstrous Dr Stone, who unhesitatingly drugs, experiments on and controls the women supposedly in her care. Like Ken Kesey’s Nurse Ratched (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Viking Press, 1962) her evil is the more noticeable because it lacks all clichéd hallmarks of horror. She is calmly intelligent and ruthlessly exploitative of a corrupt medical system that enables her sadism because she provides it with the information it requires. That the information is extracted from helpless, incarcerated women for whom representation or appeal does not exist, is not of interest to the authorities, who are content that the women are removed from society and forced into compliance until their male relatives agree to their release. ‘And the cage was designed by men,’ Rachel, one of Mercer’s inmates observes. Yet much of the horror suggested in the novel lies in the fact that it is women, supposedly in care-giver roles, who are the enforcers of male demands for female compliance.

Emily’s undercover investigation of the abuse of women in the Mercer in 1960s Toronto, runs alongside a complex, police inquiry set in the 1990s, which centres on Detective Rachel Mackenzie’s investigation into the identity of a body buried without official record or identification.  Marshall loves using dual-time narratives, influenced as she is by Phillipa Gregory and Kate Morton, experts of this structure. Dual-time enables her in Liberty Street to introduce more plots, multiple points of view and the development of central themes over time, charting progress as well as the extent to which society is still stuck, stigmatising women in ways that are not applied to men. Emily’s investigation and Rachel’s detective work finally merge to reveal the depth of corruption that created, then kept the Mercer’s Women’s Prison afloat.

Detective Mackenzie and forensic archaeologist Sawyer are both in roles that Emily could not envisaged in the 1960s, as she herself fights her mother’s expectations that she will give up her work as a journalist to marry.

The British Medical Association and Royal College of Psychiatrists still report that women’s mental health needs go unmet, either because they are misunderstood, misdiagnosed or ignored. Marshall observes that “Mental health is very much in the cultural zeitgeist right now, and finally getting its due attention, so I wanted to write a story that took a snapshot of how women’s mental health has been treated over the years.” The storyline that best encapsulates the message that Marshall wants the book to convey is Emily’s success in exposing the injustices of the Mercer, and forcing the authorities to take action. Not only does it illustrate the importance of caring enough to bring maltreatment and oppression into the light of public scrutiny, but also how much more powerful oppressed groups can be if they unite to fight back.

As Heather Marshall observes, ‘…we’re at that point in history, once again, where collective resistance against tyranny is all that will eventually save us.’

About the contributor: Elaine began her writing career submitting stories and poems to her university’s literary magazine. As a factual writer, she had a career as a professional researcher, editor and proof-reader, then ran her own company, Wordsmith. She writes short stories, flash fiction, novels and poetry, and is currently working on her second novel, The Herbalists, which explores the pressures in 19th-century England that drive a devout young woman to murder. She has won and been placed in various writing competitions. Her short stories, No Competition (2024) and Barred (2025), were highly commended in the Historical Writers Association open competition and published in their anthology. Her poem, Kells, was highly commended in the Fish International Competition and published in their 2025 anthology. She runs two writing critique groups on behalf of Chiltern Writers Group and is a member of Chiltern Poets.