This novel has a rhythm that I settled into as Lily narrates her story. From early on we know that she has murdered someone but who this is and how isn't revealed until later in the novel. Lily is abandoned as a baby and found by a police constable and taken to the Foundling Hospital. For the first six years of Lily's life she lives happily with a family on a farm in Suffolk. She is loved and cared for by the family and returning to the Foundling Hospital is distressing but there was no choice. Rose Tremain describes the cruelty delivered to the children in rich and gory detail. Any joy is taken from the children as they are ground down but Lily retains a spirit. She leaves to make wigs and the poverty and wealth of 19th century London comes alive on every page. The police officer who saved Lily reappears and the reader walks alongside the 17 year old Lily as she makes sense of the life she has been given and considers her uncertain future. ( )

Lily, the latest novel from prolific English author Rose Tremain, (b. 1943) is a cautionary tale about the perils of revenge.

Set in a Dickensian 19th century England of punitive welfare for the children of fallen women, Lily brings us the story of a child whose mother wrapped her in sacking and abandoned her in freezing weather at the gates of a park in the East End. Rescued by a passing policeman, she is taken to the London Foundling Hospital. Her first six years are spent with a kindly foster mother on a farm in Suffolk, and then — of an age to start work — she is returned to this so-called hospital and begins a life of brutal drudgery and abuse. An attempt at escape fails, her only friend dies, and the most vicious of the staff sabotages an offer of adoption.

As in the best of Dickens' novels, this catalogue of misery arouses feelings of compassion for the victim and contempt for the perpetrators, but (like Dickens) Tremain has greater ambitions than that. The reader knows from the first page that Lily is a murderer. No one else knows this, but she is tormented by her crime.

She does not fear being caught: authorities are not even certain that a crime has been committed. She fears herself.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/08/15/lily-a-tale-of-revenge-by-rose-tremain/ ( )

A child is left abandoned in the snow and is found by a young police officer. Raised as part of the Coram Foundation Lily Mortimer is now employed as a successful wigmaker but her experiences have left her embittered. As a baby Lily was fostered by a Suffolk farming family but at 6 years old she was returned to London. At the foundation Lily suffered and nursed a deep hatred of one person. When she encounters her policeman saviour years later she realises her revenge may be her downfall.
This is a really powerful, emotional book. At first Lily's tale seems odd, descriptions of a happy childhood at odds with fact that Lily has committed murder. It is only late in the book that the reader realises just what young Lily was subjected to, who she killed and why. I loved the way the writing drew me in to the tale and the enigmatic manner that jigsaw was put together. A great piece of storytelling ( )

A quietly engaging story of a Victorian orphan, well written and believable as with all Tremain’s stories.
I’m not quite sure why, but I found the style of this short novel initially jarring in its simple language, but quickly fell into the rhythm of Lily’s story. This alternates between her current (1867) life, after she has committed murder (the story at the centre of the book, as we don’t know who till much later, although we suspect why), and her upbringing as an orphan, abandoned in London and rescued by a police constable to be placed in Coram’s Foundling Hospital.
Lily’s early life is vividly described, first to the age of six on a Suffolk farm where life is hard but happy, and then when she is returned to the Foundling Hospital (orphanage) to learn a trade so that she can be useful to society (Victorian utilitarianism).
The storytelling is almost picaresque, with a profusion of potential storylines and characters creating dramatic tension, as I wondered where the story was going. This is Dickensian in the richness of creating Victorian London, but with more three dimensional secondary characters (policeman Sam Trench who finds the abandoned baby Lily, Nellie Buck her foster mother until she is six, her sadistic orphanage Nurse Maud, Belle Prettywood her employer and wig emporium proprietor, Lady Elizabeth Mortimer her benefactress, Mrs Quale seller of holy artefacts) and without the humour.
Instead the novel includes moments of poetic insight for Lily, epiphanies to heighten the story, showing how she might struggle on with her life. And struggle on she does to reach a satisfyingly open ending, full of possibilities.

I visited the Foundling Museum (built on the site of the original orphanage) about two years ago, so had some historical background to the work of the Foundling Hospital, and found this fictionalisation very engaging.

I received a Netgalley copy of this book, but this review is my honest opinion. ( )