The Philosophers Daughters by Alison Booth – Blog Tour and Review
Today I welcome Alison Booth to Beadyjans Books with the launch of her superb new historical novel.
My Review
The Philosophers Daughters is published by Red Door Publishing and is a very engaging adventurous historical novel.
It tells the story of sisters Harriet and Sarah Cameron brought up in London by their Philosopher Father after their Mother died young. He is a man ahead of his time and has many thoughts and traits which set him apart from society of the day and he brings his daughters up to be thinkers, to question rather than just accept what has always been the norm, maybe this hasn’t done the young women many favours. In 1891 women were not supposed to question anything, just to accept and get on with life and be submissive to their menfolk.
Of the 2 sisters Sarah is perhaps the least unconventional, she is the beauty and when she meets and falls in love with handsome adventurer Henry Vincent, she abandons her sibling and heads off for her own adventure, following her intended to the wilds of the Australian Outback.
Harriet a plain spinster, is left at home to help her now ageing Father, she misses her beloved sister dreadfully but she is a passionate artist and devotes herself to her drawing and painting and being her Fathers assistant. But he dies quite suddenly and she finds herself broken by grief, already grieving for the departure of sister Sarah, she flounders to know her place in the world.
So she heads off to the Outback to visit Sarah a rather daring adventure for the staid young woman. Her philosophical nature causes her to question the harshness of life in the Outback, the boorish brutal men who live there, and the injustices she encounters especially against the aborigines.
She begins to overcome her overwhelming grief with the rekindling of her closeness with her sibling, her art and a budding friendship with a native aborigine worker.
I liked both sisters but had a special place for the unlovely and unloved Harriet.
I loved experiencing life in the late 19th century in the wild and untamed cattle ranches of outback Australia. This is an unsentimental, believable and very well painted picture of what life was like for women in an era where some were just beginning to question their own worth and explore possibilities hitherto denied women merely because of their sex. A lovely literary historical book, beautifully told.
The Blurb
…. a landscape of wild beauty and savage dispossession.
London in 1891: Harriet Cameron is a talented young artist whose
mother died when she was barely five. She and her beloved sister Sarah were
brought up by their father, radical thinker James Cameron. After adventurer
Henry Vincent arrives on the scene, the sisters’ lives are changed forever. Sarah,
the beauty of the family, marries Henry and embarks on a voyage to Australia.
Harriet, intensely missing Sarah, must decide whether to help her father with his
life’s work or devote herself to painting.
When James Cameron dies unexpectedly, Harriet is overwhelmed by
grief. Seeking distraction, she follows Sarah to Australia, and afterwards into the
Northern Territory outback, where she is alienated by the casual violence and
great injustices of outback life.
Her rejuvenation begins with her friendship with an Aboriginal
stockman and her growing love for the landscape. But this fragile happiness is
soon threatened by murders at a nearby cattle station and by a menacing station
hand seeking revenge.
“Fantastic character development. Great plot. Beautiful writing. And excellent job at
promoting thought about our appalling white history of indigenous maltreatment and
massacre.” – Karen Viggers, novelist and wildlife veterinarian
Author Alison Booth
Born in Melbourne and brought up in Sydney, Alison spent over two decades
studying, living and working in the UK before returning to Australia some
fifteen years ago.
Her ancestors came to Australia from England and Scotland at the end
of the 1800s, before Federation in 1901. Indeed, in 1891, when the novel starts,
32% of the Australian population were born overseas, mostly in the UK. Alison
grew up fascinated by the thought that Australia once comprised small colonies,
teetering on the edge of the vast continent, and wanted in this new novel to
travel back in time to view it through the eyes of two strong young women. The
tales of Alison’s late father, Norman Booth, about his years in the Northern
Territory also awakened her interest in the Northern Territory.
Her debut novel, Stillwater Creek, was Highly Commended in the 2011
ACT Book of the Year Award, and afterwards published in Reader’s Digest
Select Editions in Asia and in Europe. Alison’s other novels are The Indigo
Sky (2011), A Distant Land (2012), and A Perfect Marriage (2018).
Alison is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the Australian National
University (https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/booth-al). In November
2019, Alison was made Fellow of the Econometric Society, a prestigious
international society for the advancement of economic theory in its relation to
statistics and mathematics.
