The Lodger

September 1, 2014
In this intriguing blend of fact and fiction, Treger’s debut novel explores the socially unacceptable loves of little-read author Dorothy Richardson in early 20th-century London. Still haunted by guilt over her mother’s suicide, Dorothy lives in a shabby boarding house at the seedy edge of Bloomsbury, barely supporting herself as a dentist’s assistant. In 1906, she meets and succumbs to the intelligence, eloquence, and admiration of H.G. Wells, the husband of an old school friend. Initially repelled by Wells’s scientific certainty and hesitant to betray her friend, Dorothy nevertheless capitulates to his sexual and literary urgings. The varied responses of her well drawn landlady, Mrs. Baker, and fellow boarders—Russian Jewish émigré Benjamin, Canadian Dr. Weber, and suffragette Veronica Leslie-Jones—both clarify and complicate Dorothy’s life. While deftly examining moods ranging from exhilaration to sexual longing to despair to shame, Treger uses Dorothy’s increasing confidence as a writer and eventual ability to “banish her narrator entirely”—that is, those narrative conventions of the day that she was convinced were “simply an expression of the vision, fantasies, and experiences of men”—as a metaphor for Dorothy’s emotional growth and discovery of her “inmost self.” Readers familiar with the period will recognize echoes of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton in Dorothy’s views.