Becoming Belle

June 18, 2018
In this lively novel from O'Connor (Miss Emily) the story of Isabel Bilton is tracked from a dull Hampshire upbringing under her mother's thumb to a giddy yet difficult life as a Victorian music hall entertainer and Irish countess. Isabel follows her dream to move to London, cajoling her sister Flo to join her. The two find success as a music hall sister act, and Isabel becomes entangled with a con artist claiming to be a baron from America; her subsequent pregnancy causes him to flee. A good friend, Mr. Wertheimer, sets her up in his country home, where her pregnancy progresses far from the scandal sheets, and helps her find a nursemaid to raise her son. After returning to the stage as âBelle Bilton,â she takes up with an Irish viscount. But after their marriage, his dismayed father forces him to leave the country and eventually sign divorce papers. Awkwardly written sexual encounters and the tedious back and forth between the lovers during their separation are a drawback, but O'Connor skillfully captures the mores of the time and tops it off with a wonderfully suspenseful court case. This is a transportive, enjoyable novel.

Nuala O'Connor imagines the real life of Belle Bilton, star of the music hall in late-nineteenth-century London, who marries above her station only to have to defend the marriage when her father-in-law tries to engineer a divorce. Narrator Jayne Entwistle's lovely English accent captures Belle's charm and her resolve to overcome adversity--an untitled birth, a relationship with a fraudulent American baron, an out-of-wedlock child, and an unwanted divorce adjudicated by an all-male jury. Entwistle expertly straddles the line of conveying the self-absorption of Belle's thoughts while retaining the listener's desire to see this plucky girl triumph over the men. Entwistle does it all--Victorian slang, an American pretender, a crusty judge, Irish lawyers, and a myriad of distinctive characters with class accents that range from Cockney to posh. A.B. � AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine