Hope Never Knew Horizon

Douglas Bruton

Taproot, £11.99

“Hope Never Knew Horizon” is a quotation from a love letter written by one woman to another in the 1850s. For those who don’t already recognise it, the significance of the phrase soon becomes apparent; for Bruton’s book is actually three interleaved, though not interwoven, narratives set in various times and places in the latter half of the 19th Century, all inspired by true stories and linked by the theme of “hope”.

Presented in alternating chapters, they share no characters or locations and could be read as three separate, uninterrupted novellas. But then we would lose the impression of unity that comes from examining its facets one by one.

In Amherst, Massachusetts in the 1850s, Margaret O’Brien, a housemaid with a romantic streak, closely watches Emily, daughter of the family she works for, and seems to be the only one who notices that Emily is in love with her brother’s fiancée, Susan. Emily is a poet, and exchanges letters with Susan at a feverish rate.

Sometimes, Margaret gets the chance to steal a glance at them, and although she doesn’t always follow the elevated language she is swept away by their poetically-expressed yearning and becomes deeply invested in the romance she is living vicariously through them. Emily Dickinson, of course, is more than just an amateur scribbler and will come to touch many more hearts after Susan’s and Margaret’s.

In 1880s London, the classically beautiful Ada Alice Pullen becomes the model and muse for a painter she refers to only as “Sir”, while trying to establish herself as an actress. She’s from an impoverished background in New Cross, determined to “conquer the world” and give herself and her younger siblings a better life.

Sir is entranced by her from the start, renaming her Dorothy Dene, working on her elocution and doing his best to help her acting career, while she continues to model for him in sensually charged sessions which never quite stray into impropriety. Sir (based on Frederic Leighton) is a fine painter, responsible for the perennial favourite Flaming June. But it’s when another artist poaches her for one of his own works that Ada learns how it feels to really have the world at her feet.

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The third of Bruton’s strands is not the testimony of a single narrator but is shared by a succession of voices almost all the way up to the present day, beginning with the discovery of a beached whale in Wexford County in 1891 and chronicling the various stages that lead to its skeleton hanging from the ceiling of the Hintze Hall in the Natural History Museum, where in 2017 it acquired the name “Hope”.

The whale casts a spell on everyone who encounters it, initially because of the money they can make from its carcass, but as time goes by the skeleton acquires an aura of enchantment and people claim to hear whalesong in its presence.

Hope Never Knew Horizon has a lightness and directness that belies its Victorian setting, sidestepping ornate dialogue for voices that are colloquial, intimate, confessional.

Whether the speakers are those captivated by the whale without fully understanding why, or Margaret, so charmed by Emily and Susan’s romance that it never seems to cross her mind that their love is forbidden in her day and age, or Ada, determined to succeed while staying true to her Sir, and profoundly affected by the painting in which she crosses into history, it’s a book that glows with positivity, seeking out the magic and romance underlying the everyday.