Karen’s Pick
October, 2020
Hamnet
Maggie O’Farrell
Winner of the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction, Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell, takes place in England, in 1580 in the town of Stratford-On-Avon. This poetic novel of historical fiction confronts heart break, the torment of the death of a child, and the challenges and evolution of a marriage.
The title of O’Farrell’s novel is slightly misleading since the story focuses on Agnes (Anne) Hathaway, a free spirit and healer who understands potions better than she does people and a nameless indentured young Latin tutor. Although from different economic and social standing, they fall hopelessly in love and marry. Through the early years of their marriage and birth of their three children we are witness to Agnes’s transformation. She becomes a fiercely protective mother and an influential force in the life of her young husband, whose “gifts” as a writer are just beginning to determine his adult life. He is referred to as “her husband”, or “the father”-the reader soon realizes he becomes a character of note, the world’s most famous playwright and ironically he has very little dialog.
O’Farrell has created Agnes as a woman of great strength, and passion. This book is written from the prospective of Agnes and imagines the emotional and domestic repercussions after the loss of her beloved 11 year old young son, Hamnet , who dies from the bubonic plague.
The scene in which Agnes prepares the body of her son for burial is devastating. Leaving no time for grieving, she knows that Hamnet must be buried quickly, for fear the plague will spread.
O’ Farrell writes of Agnes’s mourning;
There is a part of her that would like to wind up time, to gather it in like yarn.
She would like to spin the wheel backwards, unmake the skein of Hamnet’s death.
There will be no going back. No undoing what was laid out for them. The boy
has gone and the husband will leave and she will stay and the pigs will need
to be fed every day and time runs only one way. This moment is the absent
mother’s: the boy, the empty house, the deserted yard, the unheard cry. …
It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life.
Days after Hamnet’s death, Agnes must find the will and courage to continue being a mother to their two girls, and return to her role as healer and sage in Stratford-on-Avon. Soon after his sons burial, “the father” quickly returns to what is now his renown playhouse in London. However insensitive this action may seem we learn that four years later the playwright channels his overwhelming grief for the loss of his child into his most notable production— titled with a common version of his son’s name —Hamlet.
Be prepared-O’Farrell’s ability to draw us in to their story is extremely compelling. The reader cannot avoid the feelings and emotions that define this family. I highly recommend this book.