The Anchoress: A Novel

by Robyn Cadwallader

Overview

“The book that the whole literary world can’t stop talking about.” —Marie Claire (Australia)
“A considerable achievement.” —Sarah Dunant, The New York Times Book Review

England, 1255: Sarah is only seventeen when she chooses to become an anchoress, a holy woman shut away in a small cell, measuring seven by nine paces, at the side of the village church. Fleeing the grief of losing a much-loved sister as well as the pressure to marry, she decides to renounce the world—with all its dangers, desires, and temptations—and commit herself to a life of prayer. But when she starts hearing the voice of the previous anchoress whispering to her, seemingly from the stones themselves, it soon becomes clear that even the thick, unforgiving walls of Sarah’s cell cannot protect her as well as she had thought.

An absorbing story of faith, desire, shame, fear, and the human need for connection, The Anchoress by Robyn Cadwallader is a haunting and compelling novel: both quietly heartbreaking and thrillingly unpredictable.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250094674
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	06/14/2016
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Robyn Cadwallader has published numerous prizewinning short stories and reviews, as well as a book of poetry and a nonfiction book based on her PhD thesis concerning attitudes toward virginity and women in the Middle Ages. She lives among vineyards outside Canberra, Australia, when not traveling to England for research and visiting ancient archaeological sites along the way. The Anchoress is her first novel.

Reading Group Guide

1. Why did Sarah decide to be enclosed as an anchoress? Her reasons may be multiple.

2. What choices were available to Sarah?

3. As a child, Sarah longed to fly like Swallow, the jongleur. What use does the story make of the symbol of birds and flying?

4. What does Agnes's presence in the cell mean for Sarah?

5. Words and stories are important in this book, but each character has a slightly different relationship to them. How do Sarah, Ranaulf, Anna, Avice, and Eleanor relate to words and stories?

6. Avice says, "Afer all, a tree is always a tree, a pot is always a pot, however we say or think on it." What does she mean, do you think?

7. In the book of Genesis, Eve takes and eats the forbidden fruit, traditionally represented as an apple. There are two apples in The Anchoress. What is their significance?

8. Do you think Sarah should have told Anna that she knew Thomas raped her?

9. The word "holy" is from the Old English halig, meaning "that which must be preserved whole or intact," and is connected with the Old English word hal, meaning health and wholeness. In current usage it is a word layered with expectations: love of God, niceness, meekness, obedience, piety, and so on. Sarah hopes and prays that she will become holy. Does she? If she does, in what ways?

10. Isabella says very little, but Sarah says she has helped her decide to stay. What do you think Sarah means?

11. The Rule that Sarah follows emphasizes the dangers of the eyes above all of the senses. Think about the significance of sight in the novel. What role does it play? Keep in mind both Sarah and Ranaulf, but also the people in the village.

12. In what ways does Ranaulf change?

13. Sarah describes Father Peter's gentle care and contrasts it with Father Ranaulf's stern silences, yet she says she has learned from the spaces between Ranaulf's words. What does she mean? Does Peter's care limit her growth in any way? (He says, "You must learn humility, child. Think of it as submission to me, the man you are sworn to obey.")

14. How do you think the fire started? Why?

15. The novel is set more than seven hundred years ago; does it have any relevance to women today? How?

16. Geraldine Brooks once said of writing her own historical fiction that times and contexts may be different, but people are still people. Do you agree?

Editorial Reviews

Cadwallader’s writing evokes a heightened attention to the senses: you might never read a novel so sensuous yet unconcerned with romantic love. For this alone, it is worth seeking out. But also because The Anchoress achieves what every historical novel attempts: reimagining the past while opening a new window—like a squint, perhaps—to our present lives.” —Eleanor Limprecht, The Sydney Morning Herald

“A truly fine and deeply moving novel, one to save and read again.” —Hudson Valley News

“Cadwallader’s vivid period descriptions set a stunning backdrop for this beautiful first novel as Sarah rejects a larger world that will not allow her to live on her own terms and goes about creating a smaller one that will. Sarah’s path will intrigue readers at the crossroads of historical fiction, spirituality, and even feminism as she faces the internal and external pressures on women of the Middle Ages.” —Booklist (starred review)

“A considerable achievement for a debut novel.” —The New York Times Book Review

“An ambitious debut . . . Robyn Cadwallader plays gracefully with medieval ideas about gender, power and writing: if the Bible is the written word of God, who may read it? What might women learn from their exclusion? The classic early-modern poetic comparisons between the room, the womb and tomb are lightly carried and masterfully used at what is probably the gentle climax of the story.” —The Guardian (London)

From the Publisher

Cadwallader's writing evokes a heightened attention to the senses: you might never read a novel so sensuous yet unconcerned with romantic love. For this alone it is worth seeking out. But also because The Anchoress achieves what every historical novel attempts: reimagining the past while opening a new window - like a squint, perhaps - to our present lives.

The Sydney Morning Herald

An ambitious debut . . . [offers] pleasures of a subtle and delicate kind . . . Cadwallader plays gracefully with medieval ideas about gender, power and writing

The Guardian

Cadwallader's vivid period descriptions set a stunning backdrop for this beautiful first novel.

Booklist (starred review)

Robyn Cadwallader does the real work of historical fiction, creating a detailed, sensuous and richly imagined shard of the past. She has successfully placed her narrator, the anchoress, in that tantalizing, precarious, delicate realm: convincingly of her own distant era, yet emotionally engaging and vividly present to us in our own.

Geraldine Brooks

Sarah's story is so beautiful, so rich, so strange, unexpected, and thoughtful-also suspenseful. The narrative examines the question of whether a woman can ever really retreat from the world, or whether the world will always find a way to come after you . . . I loved this book.

Elizabeth Gilbert

05/15/2015
In 13th-century England, 17-year-old Sarah seals herself in a tiny cell attached to the village church, having chosen to renounce the outside world and live out her days in prayer as the new anchoress. What motivates a young woman to live such an ascetic and isolated life is slowly disclosed during the course of the novel, and what is revealed brings into focus questions related to gender, sexuality, power, fear, shame, and the nature of faith. VERDICT Careful historical research is blended subtly in this impressive, nuanced debut. While the slow pacing and shift of narration between Sarah and her confessor, Father Ranaulf, might deter some readers, the prose is fluid, lyrical, and accessible. The details on a little-known aspect of medieval monastic life and the tension between Sarah's desire to withdraw from the world and yet remain very much a part of it makes for compelling reading.—Lyndsie Robinson, Milne Lib., SUNY Oneonta

Library Journal

2015-03-05
Quiet, assured debut novel set in medieval England, concerning a young woman's entry into the religious life—one as tumultuous as anything on the outside. Early on in Australian writer Cadwallader's narrative, we learn that young Sarah, still a teenager, has lost her sister in childbirth: "Emma didn't speak, just looked at me, her eyes fading. Blood dripped, then ran." The elegant understatement of that terrible moment speaks to Cadwallader's approach throughout: the England of the mid-13th century is a place of rupture, oppression, intolerance, and violence outside, but within the tight-holding walls of the Midlands church and the "rough lodging" it offers, little of that outside world can enter. Even so, in time, Sarah, though seeking escape, engages with that world—and she must, for it presses in on all sides. And besides, she's not quite cut out for the isolation. Cadwallader is a poet of loneliness; few writers have captured so completely the essential madness that accompanies hermitage, the grayness and sameness of each and every day: "The stones were faces that came out when my candle was alight, some laughing, some staring, some as sad as me." She is also very good at describing the power relations that inhere in religious hierarchy ("Sister, I'm your confessor and guide. You are to obey me in all things, as your Rule says") without resorting to too-easy anachronisms, though Sarah does have her protofeminist moments. In a time when self-assertion was tantamount to sin, Cadwallader's language and tone seem just right. Readers may wish there were a little more action to move the story along, but this is an appropriately contemplative piece that is kin less to Ellis Peters' Cadfael mysteries than to Mary Sharratt's Illuminations as imaginings of medieval faith and the faithful. Sympathetic, fully realized characters and good use of period details make this a winning work of historical fiction.

Kirkus Reviews