Set mainly in Edinburgh, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell is told from the perspective of three women, the eponymous Esme Lennox, her sister Kitty and the granddaughter, Iris. It is masterful storytelling of the first order, as O’Farrell intertwines their stories as if they were pieces in an overarching jigsaw puzzle.

Iris, an independent, modern woman, leads a life unimaginable to women such as Esme and Kitty, born a mere two generations before her. Hence Esme’s astonishment when she learns that Iris has never married and that her family don’t mind. Iris is not only unapologetically single, but has studied, lived abroad and now lives alone and runs her own business. But with freedom comes other complications. An apparent commitment-phobe, Iris is in a relationship with a married man who is getting too serious about their affair. Moreover, Iris has an ambiguous relationship with her step-brother, Alex, who appears to be the love of her life.

Out of the blue, Iris is informed she has a great-aunt, Esme Lennox, who is to be released into her care from Cauldstone, a psychiatric unit, where Esme has been incarcerated for over six decades. Esme is a relative Iris never knew existed, and the one person who could tell her anything about her, her grand-mother Kitty, is in a care home suffering from dementia.

In stark contrast to Iris, Esme and Kitty are scions of an upper middle-class family, growing up within the rigid confines of genteel British society in the early twentieth century. From the off-set, the two sisters are complete opposites. Kitty, the well-behaved daughter, who obeys the rules and understands her sole aim in life is to find a husband, while Esme’s independent mind and feisty, adventurous spirit means she is at odds with the prescriptive life that society imposes on young girls of her class. Qualities, admired in boys, Esme’s spirited nature is frowned upon by her parents to such an extent that her mother’s avowed aim in trying to marry Esme off to Jamie Dalziel is the hope that marriage will finally break Esme’s spirit. When Esme realises she might marry Jamie, an eligible young man-about-town, she’s not interested. Much to the general incomprehension of her family, Esme insists she doesn’t want to get married.

This vivid depiction of Esme as a young girl is in stark contrast to the Esme who Iris meets. Having been institutionalised for so long, Esme has learnt the value of making herself invisible and to appear docile; she understands that the only chance she has to be considered ‘sane’ and of getting back out into the world is to be ‘ordinary’, to be a ‘good girl’. She has led a life where showing emotion such as crying can get her into trouble. It is a life that has never been her own, so much so, that her bath at Iris’s is the first unsupervised bath she’s had in over sixty years. It is also a life, so starved of affection and care, that when Iris thoughtfully turns off the car radio, believing that Esme is sleeping, it almost makes Esme cry. ‘This is the single nicest act Esme has witnessed in a long time.’ How achingly sad is that?

At one point Alex berates Iris, telling her ‘Iris, you don’t get banged up for sixty years for nothing.’ This brings us to the most unsettling aspect of Esme Lennox: the ease with which women regarded as ‘troublesome’ could be put away in an asylum for life with the flick of a pen from a GP in cahoots with a husband, tired of his wife or a father wanting shot of a daughter he can’t control.

It makes for a chilling read as Iris skims through the spurious (if historically accurate) grounds why women such as Esme could be incarcerated. ‘A Cockenzie fishwife who showed signs of libidinous and uncontrolled behaviour. A youngest daughter who eloped to Ireland with a legal clerk,’; ‘a Jane who had had the temerity to take long, solitary walks and refuse offers of marriage’; ‘of refusals to speak, of unironed clothes, of never wanting marital relations or wanting them too much or not enough or not in the right way or seeking them elsewhere’.

And why is Esme there in the first place? According to the admission records, Esme was sent to Cauldstone, aged 16, for ‘dancing before a mirror, dressed in her mother’s clothes’. As the strands of the narrative come together and the extent of Kitty’s betrayal of her sister is laid bare, we learn there was more behind Esme’s vanishing act.  It also explains Esme’s desperate reaction when she discovers the green cloth is missing from the paltry collection of items that are given back to her when she is finally allowed to leave Cauldstone with Iris.

The description of the events surrounding the green cloth is gut-wrenching. Firstly, there is the sheer inhumanity with which a 16 year-old girl is treated; innocent and naive, abandoned by her family, Esme is at a loss as to what is happening to her. She is shown no compassion by the staff with the exception of one young nurse, and, in the end, is not even allowed to keep the scrap of green cloth: the only thing she has left.

Whereas it may seem unconscionable to a modern reader that Esme would be abandoned by her family in such a way, merely to safeguard their good name, what is more unfathomable is the behaviour of Kitty. At first, the reader is unaware of what exactly Kitty is admitting to. Her connivance in her sister’s fate is drip-fed to us via her demented mind. At the root of Kitty’s betrayal is the resentment she feels towards Esme that Esme’s unconventional behaviour will jeopardize her chances of hooking a husband but, most of all, it is pure, unadulterated jealousy: Kitty is jealous that the boy she is attracted to, Jamie, is smitten with Esme who is indifferent to his charms. Later married to a (presumably) gay man, bereft of her conjugal rites, Kitty is jealous of what she assumes is her sister’s more worldly experience. Wanting a child and to give at least the semblance of a happy married life, Kitty takes Esme’s son and abandons her sister to her fate.

But Kitty is not just a passive bystander who profits from Esme’s incarceration.  Kitty actively informs on her sister to ensure she is taken away. Moreover, not once in over six decades does Kitty visit her. Admittedly, Kitty is at first unaware of all the letters Esme has sent her but even after she discovers them, she still never visits or tries to arrange for Esme’s release after the demise of their parents. It is a bitter irony that as Esme fights being taken away to Cauldstone, it is Kitty’s name she screams, unaware that Kitty’s response is to put her hands over her ears.

Deep down, Kitty knows she has done wrong, admitting to herself that once Esme had gone she couldn’t bear spending nights in their bedroom without her. Even in the midst of her dementia, Kitty still feels guilt yet can’t bring herself to take responsibility for what she has done. ‘I was waiting in a room. It wasn’t my fault. They told me afterwards.’ It is obviously the one thing preying on what is left of her mind as she keeps telling herself ‘never meant her to go for ever. I never meant that at all.’ ‘I was just so eaten up, at that time’.

As for Jamie, good-looking, rich and with such a sense of entitlement, he can’t believe that Esme isn’t interested in him. Jamie is attracted to Esme precisely because she is different from all the other girls. He’s convinced that Esme is the one woman that marriage wouldn’t change. ‘I can’t imagine you being changed by anything,’ he tells her. Ironically, it is his actions that precipitate Esme’s life changing for good. He, of course, faces no repercussions for his behaviour besides being sent off to an uncle for a bit. Meanwhile, what happens to Esme is dismissed by both her parents and his, and her behaviour is put down to her being hysterical and the need to have ‘a wee rest’ to ‘learn to behave’.

When Esme and Kitty finally meet, the irony is that Esme is a free woman at last and Kitty is the one who has lost her mind and in a home, albeit a much more comfortable institution than the one Esme found herself in. Face to face with her sister after all these years, Kitty utters excuses and denials but, by now, Esme knows the full extent of her sister’s betrayal. The ending is left ambiguous. Esme has presumably killed her. Is it out of compassion for a sister that Esme always cared about? Is it out of revenge? The only thing we can be sure of is that Iris is there for her.

For Esme, ‘This girl (Iris) is remarkable to her. She is a marvel.’ No doubt in Iris, Esme recognises the woman she could have been had she been born several decades later. That may also be why Kitty seemed to grow less fond of Iris as she got older.

Seeing how narrowly prescribed women’s lives were in the past, if nothing else, Esme Lennox makes you grateful that, as a woman, you weren’t born in earlier times. Esme Lennox is both a gripping read and a warning from history as to how recent the rights and freedoms women currently enjoy are. Even down to something as everyday as the way women can dress. It’s easy to forget that choosing to dress how we like is thanks to the innate changes which feminism has embedded in everyday life. No wonder Esme stares at Iris ‘hair cropped in at the neck, a silver ring on her thumb, a short skirt and red shoes that tie around her ankle’. In her day, she was punished for walking barefoot under the hot Indian sun or told off for forgetting her hat or gloves.

With that in mind, if you happen to have a female friend who is adamant she is not a feminist, then do her a favour and give her a copy of The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox. She may soon realise that what women today take for granted such as going for a walk on their own, wanting a higher education, deciding to stay single, having autonomy over their bodies is feminism in action: they are ‘freedoms’ that women a hundred years ago could only have dreamed of.

Liked it? Take a second to support Maureen on Patreon!