The World Before Us

January 26, 2015
In Hunter’s (Stay) haunting new novel, Jane Standen was a babysitter in her teens when five-year-old Lily Eliot disappeared on her watch. Now, 20 years later, Jane is an archivist at London’s Chester Museum, which is due to close. While doing research on Victorian-era rural asylums, Jane comes across a reference to the Whitmore Hospital for Convalescent Lunatics and a young woman called N, who, back in 1877, disappeared in the same woods where Lily vanished. After a confrontation at the museum with Lily’s father, William Eliot, a botanist who has written a book on Victorian plant hunters, Jane flees to the north of England to find out what happened to N. Her research shows that N’s fate was inextricably linked to that of George Farrington, a botanist whose estate was located near the asylum. Farrington also had links to the Chesters, who founded the museum where Jane works. Jane goes into the woods, hoping to make sense of things. Narrated by a chorus of ghosts and featuring a romance with a hunky young gardener at the estate, Jane’s story is an emotionally and intellectually satisfying journey in the manner of A.S. Byatt’s Possession and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. And like those two works’ juxtaposition of past and present, this one movingly dramatizes how unknowable the past can be.

January 15, 2015
Hunter's haunting-if sometimes elusive-second novel (Stay, 2005) wavers between practical life in the present and the unplumbed memories of a British archivist and her long-dead research subjects.Twenty years ago, 15-year-old Jane was babysitting Lily when the 5-year-old went missing in some English woodland between the Whitmore, an abandoned Victorian mental asylum, and Inglewood House, the former estate of 19th-century plant hunter George Farrington. Now Jane is an archivist at the Chester Museum in London, founded in 1868 by Edmund Chester, whose wife, Charlotte, hinted in her diary of a romantic attachment with George's brother Norvill Farrington. Jane has never truly recovered from Lily's unsolved disappearance, guilt tangling with her confused adolescent attraction toward Lily's widowed father, William. When she hears William speak at the Chester about his new book concerning George Farrington, unresolved feelings well up, and Jane runs away to revisit the site of Lily's disappearance. She is not alone: A chorus of stranded souls follows her. Having found Jane while she was researching the Whitmore logbook for her graduate school dissertation years ago, they hope she will lead them to remember their lives and especially deaths. In those logbooks, Jane stumbled across another disappearance in the area a hundred years before Lily's: a woman identified only as N. Having Jane try to solve the two unconnected disappearances, the author transforms Jane the archivist into Jane the detective. But like other fictional detectives, and despite her sizzling romance with an inappropriately young gardener, Jane is never as interesting as those she unwittingly investigates-a host of spirits with unresolved deaths who share stories heartbreaking in their complicated humanness, from the farmer who's more bird than man to the barely closeted schoolmaster to the lawyer blaming himself for his infant's death to Norvill Farrington, whose desperate love for the ambivalent Charlotte causes disaster. Not an easy read but a compelling exploration of how memory shapes and is shaped by individuals and society.

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February 1, 2015
When she was 15, Jane Standen lost track of the five-year-old girl she was watching while on a walk in the woods. The girl was never found, the event changing Jane in profound ways and making her much more timid in both her career choice and her personal life. Some 20 years after the girl's disappearance, Jane is working as an archivist and is researching the history of N, a woman who went missing in 1877 from a lunatic asylum located near the woods where Jane's young charge also disappeared. Surrounding Jane is a chorus of ghosts, possibly inmates of the asylum, who use Jane as the fulcrum through which they can pinpoint their names and life circumstances, in the hope that such knowledge will free them from their state of limbo. Hunter (Stay, 2005) explores the way the past bleeds into the present and how recorded history can never come close to capturing the richness of a person's interior life. If the narrative is sometimes too crowded with voices, Hunter's beautiful prose and knowledge of the Victorian era are their own reward.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)