Scala Radio Book Club: Learwife by J.R. Thorp
Indie Book of the Month
Last updated 11th Jan 2022
Mark Forrest’s guest in the Scala Radio Book Club (4th November) was the librettist and author J.R. Thorp on her brand-new novel and Indie Bookshop Fiction of the Month, Learwife.
The untold story of King Lear’s wife, written out of history yet with a mesmerising tale to tell, lyrically imagined by a hugely exciting new literary voice.
I am the queen of two crowns, banished fifteen years, the famed and gilded woman, bad-luck baleful girl, mother of three small animals, now gone. I am fifty-five years old. I am Lear's wife. I am here.
Word has come. Care-bent King Lear is dead, driven mad and betrayed. His three daughters too, broken in battle. But someone has survived: Lear's queen. Exiled to a nunnery years ago, written out of history, her name forgotten. Now she can tell her story.
Though her grief and rage may threaten to crack the earth open, she knows she must seek answers. Why was she sent away in shame and disgrace? What has happened to Kent, her oldest friend and ally? And what will become of her now, in this place of women? To find peace she must reckon with her past and make a terrible choice - one upon which her destiny, and that of the entire abbey, rests.
Giving an unforgettable voice to a woman whose absence has been a tantalising mystery, Learwife is a breathtaking novel of loss, renewal and how history bleeds into the present.
Mark wanted to go back and find out more about the original source material. ‘What do we know from Shakespeare's play of Lear's wife, the Queen?’
‘So, there are two references to King Lear’s wife in the play’, Jennifer said. ‘One is direct. The other is very obscure. There is a line from Act II Scene Four, where Lear says, “I would divorce me from thy mother’s tomb, Sepulchring an adultress.” So, the implication is that she is dead or that he believes her to be dead. And then in another section of the same scene, he refers to mother in a way, he's trying to contain his own emotions. But that's it, that's all there is.’
Mark asked, ‘The story of the life of a queen, as you tell is fascinating, because she lives a life of immense privilege, but she's still completely beholden to her husband. How much freedom would even the most privileged, wealthiest and richest women in society have had at that time?’
‘It was a brutally patriarchal society. You can see that I've tried to make that quite resonant, even in what is mostly an all-female book. The presence of male power and the constraints of male power and what it requires of women is always very important in the book. It was one of the reasons I chose to set it in a nunnery to really bring out that starkness of even if there are no men visible, that's still where all the power seems to reside and where a lot of preconceptions about what power it comes from.’
‘When you went to agents into publishers with this idea, Jennifer, how easy was it to sell to them?’ Mark asked.
‘I was lucky because I had a finished book’, said Jennifer. ‘A few of them said, we'd like you to rewrite it because the contemporary section of the book is set in a nunnery. They wanted to see her outside of the nunnery, seeing her escape, and run around the countryside causing chaos. And that wasn't really the book that I wanted to write.’
Mark wanted to know more about Jennifer’s other writing pursuits. ‘I mention the Indie Bookshop Fiction of the Month award, before this, looking at your CV, you were a librettist and lyricist. What does that actually mean you do?’
‘I'm still doing it. I am the writing partner of the composer Toby Young, who's an award-winning composer. We get a lot of commissions from all sorts of different places, the Arts Council, St. Paul's Cathedral, we just did a selection of songs for the environmental agency. Essentially, he writes the music and I write the lyrics. There is nothing like hearing an entire choir of people singing what you've written. I don't think I'll ever get over it!’