The Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo
England, April 1819. Mary Willcox, destitute and desperate, is attacked, assaulted and left in a ditch by two farm labourers. Later, a badly-beaten-up girl appears. She speaks no known language and she looks foreign. Who is she? Where does she come from? In an age where people gawp at ‘mermaids’ and other curiosities at country fairs, she exudes an intriguing air of nobility and mystery.
Mrs Worrall of Knole Park and her teenage daughter, Cassandra, take the girl under their wing. Learned men come to visit and pronounce on her and her condition. Somehow, she acquires a name and a provenance: she is the Princess Caraboo of the Malay Islands, and she keeps everyone fascinated by her religious rituals up on the roof, her ability to kill a pigeon with a bow and arrow and the exotic clothes she chooses to wear.
What interests Johnson is the relationship between pretence and reality. Men, Caraboo thinks, can dissemble. A rich young man can play the debonair buck in a gaming club; a callous roué in a brothel; or be a tongue-tied youth with a lady from his own class. Which, if any, of these personas is the true one?
But women have no such choice. How can a working-class girl, seduced and abandoned by her lover, having lost her baby and been kicked out by her parents, without money or connections, ever change the constrictions binding her class and sex? Can she ever become somebody else, someone with a brighter future to look forward to? Or must she end up half-starved and abused in the poorhouse and with nothing but drudgery until a poverty-stricken death?
The author has taken the true history of Mary Willcox and turned it into a fascinating and perceptive story. Any teenage girl should enjoy this book.
