On Sackville Street
1869. Milandra Carter, a wealthy widow with a mysterious past, arrives in Dublin and instantly raises hackles. She won’t wear mourning, and she insists on running the family wine business herself, instead of allowing a man to run it for her, as is seemly. And her secret ambition is to marry Nicholas Fontenoy, who is already engaged to Bishop Staffordshire’s daughter. Milandra will stop at nothing to get her way in both love and business; and she is ruthless when crossed. Just how far will her determination go? Could it include murder?
1916, and Dublin explodes into violence in the Easter Rising. Milandra, now an old woman still living in her home in Sackville Street, is right on the front line. Events swiftly unfold which begin to uncover dark secrets she thought would remain hidden forever.
On Sackville Street is a real page-turner which had me gripped from page one. I enjoyed her portrayal of 1860s Dublin with its elegant Georgian houses and well-to-do people living the high life at its centre, and the poverty-stricken underbelly with its drunkenness, ragged children and near famine in the slums not a stone’s throw away. The events of the Easter Rising are skilfully woven in with the British Empire’s involvement in World War One, and their determination to crush the Rising before it can spread. And we can see all too clearly exactly why there is trouble brewing as the disaffected poor begin to demand the right to rule themselves. My one niggle is that the author allows the upper classes to be on first-name terms almost instantly, even between men and women, which just wouldn’t have happened at that date. She should read Mrs Oliphant, an excellent observer of 19th century social mores, to see exactly how the social system worked.
