It’s Victorian era London and Anne Stanbury has sentenced to rehabilitation in an asylum for killing her son. Her lower-class husband, Edgar, deeply resents her for destroying his chance at assuming the Stanbury estate. Compounding matters, Edgar is drowning in debt while surrounded by in-laws and servants who hate his guts, not to mention being pestered by his alcoholic parasite of a father.
This is Rachel Florence Roberts’s debut novel THE MEDEA COMPLEX, and everyone is not as they seem. Was Anne gripped by a bout of madness, or was she right-of-mind when she killed her son? Does Edgar truly love Anne? What sort of duplicity are the in-laws and staff up to?
“You’re lying to yourself.”
THE MEDEA COMPLEX is a gripping page turner, propulsive but also reflective; it has sensational action, but also features an array of interior musings by the major players in the tale. Each character is intriguingly complex, and their motives and full back-stories unfurl through the pages, until you realize that each and every one of them are selfish assholes.
I love a book chock full of despicable folks, especially when they’re acting out of faulty reasoning.
While THE MEDEA COMPLEX was spurred into existence by Roberts’s postpartum depression, it was also inspired by the Victorian-era realities of inheritance and estates, barbaric grasp of psychiatry and mental illness — which included the belief that madness in women can be induced by reading — and cruelty of some ‘baby farms’
Baby farms in the Victorian era were a service where individuals took in children whose parents could not support, either because of finances, illegitimacy, or other reasons. While some farms were well-run, others were little more than profit centers and often resulting in exploiting the children or worse: allowing them to die due to starvation, or simply killing them.
As detailed in the author’s notes, Roberts emphasizes that — while a number of the characters are absolute fabrications — some are inspired by real-life scumbags, such prolific baby farmer/serial killer Amelia Dyer. *1
There’s nothing like drawing from the well of actual historical criminals to give your morally grey character a pitch-black veneer.
While the characters often act cruel and perform reprehensible acts, they are often the actions of necessity and of survival, especially the acts committed by women. One of the few well-meaning characters, Anne’s doctor — Dr. George Savage — is extraordinarily sexist, but in a blunt manner that was professionally accepted at the time. Roberts handled the reality of the situation by having Anne and others subvert his expectations in satisfying ways, ways that come to haunt him in the end.
Colorfully dour and unsavory, with characters sinking lower and lower with every page, immersed in a historically accurate and unsentimental rendering of Victorian London, MEDEA is delightfully cynical while not quite being nihilistic. It’s a taunt work of intrigue that confidently scrutinizes the effect of patriarchy on medical matters, on generational inheritance, of the fiscal and mental fallout of motherhood.
“After all, ranking is merely an accident of birth.”
- If you’re interested in reading about how lurid Victorian murders were and how they were portrayed and detailed by the media, I highly recommend Judith Flanders’s THE INVENTION OF MURDER (2011). It’s telling that baby farming is only allotted a handful of pages and not considered nearly as scandalous as other acts of the time!) ↩︎
