Mrs Engels by Gavin McCrea (Scribe) has been shortlisted for The Desmond Elliott Prize 2016. Also in the running to win £10,000 for best debut novel of the year are The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney (John Murray) and The House at the Edge of the World by Julia Rochester (Penguin). The winner will be announced at a ceremony on 22nd June.
Gavin McCrea’s debut is a long, sweeping novel narrated by Lizzie Burns, a.k.a. Mrs Engels. At the novel’s opening, Lizzie moves from Manchester to Primrose Hill with Frederick Engels. In their advancing years, they are to spend more time with Karl Marx, on the cusp of communist fame, Marx’s wife Jenny, and their daughters, Janey and Tussy. Lizzie and Frederick have no children of their own. It appears their relationship is one of convenience; Lizzie is happy in the knowledge she will be taken care of, and Frederick has a partner to attend to his needs and household.
Lizzie’s voice is strikingly singular. A Mancunian of Irish descent, and a factory girl for much of her life, colloquialisms come across in her strong words and matronly judgements. Lizzie feels the power of being a kept woman and has an eye for other people’s secrets, but takes no nonsense from anyone, especially the revolutionary Frenchmen who frequent Marx’s home.
It becomes apparent early on that Frederick’s previous lover hangs over their relationship. Just as we begin to hanker after the mystery woman’s identity, the novel jumps back to Lizzie’s youth in the Mancunian mill. We quickly learn that Frederick’s former flame was, in fact, Lizzie’s sister, Mary, who began a romance with Frederick when he took over the mill. The novel is fused together with class and familial tensions, against a backdrop of communes and revolutions in the early 1870s. Frederick’s interest in Mary stemmed from his fascination with the proletariat, and refusal of his bourgeoisie, capitalist family.
As the novel flows back and forth between the present and past in an impressively seamless manner, McCrea allows us to build a picture of Frederick and Mary’s troubled relationship, and the events that led to Lizzie accompanying him to their present London situation. I won’t go any further at risk of spoilers… but if you’re a fan of The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton, you should read this debut.
McCrea creates the sense of exact historical setting with ease, just as Burton does, albeit with an older narrator in a different country, two hundred years later. The tone in Mrs Engels is overall more light-hearted than Burton’s; the reader will feel safe in the hands of Lizzie Burns, who has learned her own mind over her many years in Frederick’s company. Lizzie does not forget her roots in Manchester’s Irish working class, nor her former lover, Moss. Love and sex are fleeting moments of necessity in this novel, often not for Lizzie’s pleasure but for the people surrounding her.
The novel’s fault is allowing Lizzie to grow old without a sense of happiness or satisfaction. Lizzie says on her deathbed, ‘the release is forgetting’, but it is clear she has not forgotten the burdens that weigh her down throughout. Mrs Engels captures a particular moment in history, and its politics are always present but take a back seat in the face of domestic life. I look forward to seeing McCrea’s sophomore novel, and whether he will again choose to inhabit people of the past or create his own. Either way, we are certainly promised strong voices which come to life on the page.
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This year’s conference kicked off with a keynote address by Juliet Mabey, co-founder of 
The Academic Book of the Future showcase itself was introduced by the project team: Sam Rayner, Nick Canty, Bex Lyons, Simon Tanner and Marilyn Deegan. It’s great to see scholars from both KCL and UCL working together on such an important project. The project began in 2013 and is funded by the AHRC in collaboration with The British Library. The project’s aim is to question the future of the academic book and the team hope these discussions will continue. Lyons stressed that the project mantra is ‘collaboration, conversation, dialogue’ and that this had been evidenced by the traffic on the Twitter feed.
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