The Second-Best Whore in Town by Mairi Kidd review: 'women's history rescued from the margins'
In her new book of short stories Mairi Kidd sets out to extricate women from the footnotes of history and place them on the main stage, writes David Robinson
Anyone writing fiction about real people in the past, Hilary Mantel once observed, must realise that they won’t be able to satisfy everyone: historians will always wonder why some things have been left out and literary critics why other things were left in. In Mairi Kidd’s latest book, the historians will have very little to complain about.
In a brief foreword, Kidd rightly points out that women’s stories - especially in the Gaelic tradition - have been neglected for centuries. The “wise women, wenches and witches” she writes about in the nine stories here might have made it onto the historical record as people in their own right, but often only in the footnotes. What she is attempting is to place them back on the main stage, with the laudable aim of widening the beam of posterity’s searchlight.
Because source material is so relatively thin in the distant past, she takes it from places where readers seldom go: Adomnán’s biography of Columba, written at the end of the 7th century for stories about his mother Eithne (born around 500 AD); the Lanercost Chronicle for a brief description of Devorgilla of Galloway, the founder of Sweetheart Abbey and benefactor of Oxford’s Balliol College, written after her death in 1290; or the Gaelic poetry of Iseabail Ní Mheic Cailéin in the Book of the Dean of Lismore, compiled in the early 16th century.
Although all three of these stories are told in the first person, when they occasionally fail to convince, it is not because Kidd gets the history wrong but because she treats it too reverently. With Devorgilla, for example – in her day the most powerful woman in Scotland – details of genealogy, land deals and political history seem to come ahead of attempting to portray her character.
As we move past the 16th century, though, things get easier for the writer of historical fiction. Quite simply, there are more facts around to spur their imagination - in the case of Fife-born prostitute Priss Carsewell, heroine of Kidd’s title story, an almost indecent amount. Or rather, the facts themselves are indecent: I don’t, for example, think I can bring myself explain in a family newspaper why the brothel she ran in London was written up in a guide as “Mrs Fotheringham’s Chucking Shop”. Hers was, however, a fascinating life, even if not a fully realised one here. Reading up on Carsewell, I was surprised to discover that while in jail she held talks with other brothel-owners about forming a courtesan’s guild, with subscriptions allowing them to pay doctors to perform abortions and “restore” virginities.
Perhaps the corollary of Mantel’s observation about historical fiction is that sometimes one reads it for the history as much as for the fiction. That, for me at least, is the case here. As the Countess of Seaforth prepares to burn a sorcerer in one of Kidd’s stories, she outlines what it is all going to cost, right down to the barrel of tar in which he is going to be burnt and the cost of the lawyers and entertaining guests travelling to see it – and right enough, I’d never previously considered witch-hunting in terms of accountancy. Columba’s mother, seeing illuminated manuscripts for the first time, is warned not to touch the prepared calfskin as the oils in her fingers would leave the surface unable to take ink. Again, the sort of grounding detail I had never thought of. There are plenty more, and the 22 pages of historical notes at the end are both thorough and informative.
One last discovery. Devorgilla is described as “maritorious”. There’s a word you don’t see often – fewer than 0.01 times for every million words in English, according to the OED – and, like me, you may have thought it a spelling mistake for “meritorious”. Not at all – it’s the female version of the adjective “uxorious”, which only applies to men. Maybe it, like so much women’s history, needs rescuing from the margins too.
The Second-Best Whore in Town, by Mairi Kidd, Black & White, £16.99
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