Despite a few men to the contrary — and most of them queer in some shape or form — gothic literature has always rightfully been a woman’s realm. With this confident debut novel, that tradition remains as true today as when the Brontë sisters first transmuted their collective grief, isolation, and haunting native moors into genre-defining masterpieces.
Yet where so many of those stories draw deep from the writer’s innermost imaginings, author Louise Davidson infuses this whole story with lived experience. The writer harnessed her Aunt Pat’s ability to receive messages from the dead and predict dreams to create the titular character of Olivia Richmond, creating a character who feels truly alive.
Olivia is a fascinating addition to the genre. She’s at once familiar, yet compelling for only ever being observed through the single narrator: Julia Pearlie, hired as a companion to prepare Olivia for life in London. For the denizens of a provincial town in the Cambridgeshire fens, Olivia’s self-proclaimed abilities and striking pure white skin have transformed her into the Mistcoat Witch.
To modern readers, much of Olivia’s strange behaviours read as neurodivergence. Yet, by placing this in a Victorian setting, she’s made abject. The period backdrop conjures a time of repressed female sexuality and duality, providing a clever way to highlight modern differences, and societal expectations that remain almost unchanged. Anyone familiar with the Showtime series Penny Dreadful will also find more than a passing resemblance of Eva Green’s Miss Vanessa Ives to Olivia, especially during tarot readings and séance scenes.
Although clearly indebted to genre pillars like Jane Eyre and Rebecca, Davidson is playing in the bountiful box of tropes that comes with a retro Victorian setting. Julia arrives in town to locals telling stories of ghosts (a Shambler in this case) and spooky goings on at night. She glimpses things in the trees during her carriage ride, evoking Jonathan Harker’s approach to Dracula’s castle. There’s an invalid in the house, Olivia’s ailing grandfather, who’s so often heard howling in distress but rarely seen. There’s even a suspicious housekeeper guarding secrets.
Though Julia has plenty of secrets of her own, she’s tenacious, steadfast, and headstrong, an evolution of the clumsy spinster cluttering so many other Victoriana novels (both past and present). She also has her own traumas whispering inside her head, haunted by the boy who drowned during her last job. Uncovering what truly happened that day is one of the central mysteries propelling the story forward.
Olivia, Julia, and housekeeper Mrs Hayes aside, many of the supporting cast and minor characters come off as wooden. Descriptors of setting and place are sparse, so much of the novel’s immersion rests on the characters, leaving some scenes flat — certainly compared to others alive enough to smell the pondweed of the drowned boy’s apparitions. It is, after all, a debut novel that reads like one, but each page only shows how much room Davidson has to grow. Where the prose excels is the great grasp of period language, keeping the reader rooted in the story as much as the central characters.
Make no mistake, The Fortunes of Olivia Richmond is a very modern novel, especially where it departs from the ponderous pacing of classic novels of the genre, to something closer to a page turner. It’s a quick and effortless read and, like the very best gothics, keeps you reading fervently to the very end, with plot twists and turns to keep you up late into the long autumn night.
WRITER
Louise Davidson
PUBLISHER
Moonflower Books
RELEASE
Available now
