The Rhine Journey

Reading the latest offering from McNally Editions, you might think it’s a reissue of a slim Victorian classic. It’s actually a historical novel that was shortlisted for the 1981 Booker Prize. Schlee not only sets her story in 1851; she seems to transform herself into a lady scribbler of that era. She allows no anachronisms of ideology or tone, understanding that she only has to record women’s daily lives and her modern readers will feel her feminist points more powerfully for having been shown and not told.  Even her sly humor is exactly what you would expect a snarky spinster to indulge in with plausible deniability. Schlee’s writing is precisely calibrated to convey the nuances that carry so much meaning in a repressive atmosphere and her characters—both women and men—are believably (de)formed by the strictures of their times. And she so shrewdly dropped hints to convince me I knew how the story would end, that I was doubly wowed for having been misled. —Liz Old Book of the Week