#20: 1851-1855: Covers the Great Exhibition; Crimean War

In The Winter Journey, the story of the Morland family shifts focus for a bit. A distant cousin arrives from South Carolina in time for the Great Exhibition. Charlotte, happily married to Oliver Fleetwood, uses her wealth and influence to help build a hospital, in London just as cholera strikes. Her brother, Cavendish, is a cavalry officer called to the Crimea; and Oliver, an intelligence officer, goes there too, along with Charlotte.

The family takes a bit of a back seat to the historical events that are taking place. The Crimean War takes up a good chunk of the novel, especially the tragic Charge of the Light Brigade, which I’d obviously heard about but never really knew much of. Cynthia Harrod-Eagles gives her readers a good fictional account of what happened that day, as well as the other battles that occurred during that war. It’s the Morlands’ participation in the big (and small) events in history that makes this series so appealing, and this novel didn’t disappoint in that regard. As you might expect from a book in this series, lots of famous people make cameos; through Charlotte’s hospital work, predictably she meets Florence Nightingale. But I do enjoy seeing these real people from history walk across the stage at various points.

As I’ve said the family watch from the sidelines as history is taking place; but what I love about these characters is that Harrod-Eagles never foces a modern mindset upon them. They all behave with this same mores that you would expect from the period, so that Charlotte isn’t some modern feminist or something! In this way, the author makes her characters seem more real. ( )

Medicine, marriage, and the military. These are the central historical developments that fill Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’s 20th Morland Dynasty novel. The Winter Journey begins in 1851, with the central characters from The Hidden Shore coping with marriage and/or parenthood; some happily, and others not so happily. Charlotte has more or less taken over the role of principal Morland heroine, but Fanny and Mary get some attention, as does Benedict, Rosamund, and Lucy.

The focus on Charlotte means that much of the action takes place in London, rather than in Yorkshire, but Charlotte’s charitable activities allow readers to step outside the world of the rich and see a different side of London. This is, I believe, one of the advantages that the historical fiction author has over authors from the actual period. Yes, Victorian novelists wrote about the poor, often with great compassion and insight, but it would have been less than respectable for them to write in such detail about the living conditions of the poor. I’ve also been continually impressed with how she shows the limitations of various mind-sets of the past without adopting a sense of “presentism” in which today’s attitudes are always to be preferred. Every era has strengths and weaknesses, and Harrod-Eagles seems to understand that. It’s one of the things that makes this series so good.

Besides Charlotte’s charitable work, which focuses on medical reform and advances and allows her to cross paths with Florence Nightingale, the book also looks at the power dynamics between husbands and wives, mostly though the eyes of Fanny. The last half of the book takes several characters to Russia for the Crimean War and the charge of the light brigade. As always, Harrod-Eagles does a wonderful job writing battle scenes, and the details about the field hospitals and the horrifying winter the soldiers faced in the Crimea made for gripping reading.

See my complete review at Shelf Love. ( )

Another interesting tale in the saga of the Morland family. Good descriptions of the war in Crimea. ( )