Frannie Langton stands accused of murdering her employers. Officially no longer a slave since she was brought from Jamaica to England, she is nevertheless "given" by her old slave master to the scientist and his wife. She protests that she loved and would not have killed the wife, but she is unable to remember the actual events of the evening in question.
This is a searing work, masterfully combining elements of Victorian Gothic novels, literary, and historical fiction, and in the end it's impossible to classify because of Frannie Langton's refusal to be classified. The root of so many of the evils in this book is slavery, but she knows that her abolitionist would-be benefactors don't want her real, full story, her real, full, messy self in their slave narratives, either. There's all the laudanum and infidelity and prostitution and violence that one could want in a sensation novel, plus horrific acts in the name of science that can only be based in reality because no mad Victorian scientist in a novel would think of them, and yet Frannie is too proud, too fully human, too real for it to turn melodramatic. Collins has said that this book is in part a response to Jane Eyre, and, although I have several books on my TBR pile in the right genre to make this statement inaccurate over the next few months, it is as of yet a truer descendant of it than any actual Jane Eyre retelling than I have read.
Overall: A
The Confessions of Frannie Langton will be available May 21.