Escaping the constraints of life as a village schoolmistress, Lilia Brooke bursts into London and into Paul Harris’s orderly life, shattering his belief that women are gentle creatures who need protection. Lilia wants to change women’s lives by advocating for the vote, free unions, and contraception. Paul, an Anglican priest, has a big ambition of his own: to become the youngest dean of St. … John’s Cathedral. Lilia doesn’t believe in God, but she’s attracted to Paul’s intellect, ethics, and dazzling smile.As Paul is increasingly driven to rise in the church, Lilia finds her calling in the militant Women’s Social and Political Union. They can’t deny their attraction, but they know they don’t belong in each other’s worlds. Lilia would rather destroy property and serve time in prison than see her spirit destroyed and imprisoned by marriage to a clergyman, while Paul wants nothing more than to settle down and keep Lilia out of harm’s way. Paul and Lilia must reach their breaking points before they can decide whether their love is worth fighting for.
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I loved this book! Great tale of a suffragette in Edwardian England who falls in love with a clergyman. Clarissa Harwood captures the spark of wonder that occurs when two people with very different views of the world discover they are more alike than they’d imagined. A thoughtful and intriguing picture of the suffragettes and the society they wished to change.
Impossible Saints by Clarissa Harwood depicts the struggles of suffragettes against well-entrenched British sociopolitical mores. She personalizes the struggle for women’s voting rights with by a love relationship between Lilia and Paul. Lilia, an strong, out-spoken young woman, is a leader in Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union, against her childhood friend, Paul, a quiet intellectual, is an Anglican priest. These two, despite a strong physical and emotional attachment, deny their bond and go their separate ways, with Lilia participating in increasingly dangerous protests and Paul working his way up the hierarchy of the church.
I found the second half of the book, where these diverse personalities negotiate the terms of a relationship acceptable to them both, riveting.
There’s something magical about reading a book where the main characters are so well-drawn they transcend the page and pull you into their story. Paul and Lilia are two such characters. Their relationship does seem impossible (Paul is an Anglican priest and Lilia a suffragette) and their goals and ambitions do seem at odds with one another, but throughout the book, I kept hoping two such exceptional people would find a way to bridge their differences.
Impossible Saints is a history lesson, wrapped in a love story, wrapped in a fascinating tale. I received an advance copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review, but I’ll buy this book and read it again and again.
It is hard to believe that this novel is a debut. The author, Clarissa Harwood, certainly writes like someone who has not only done years of homework, but one who writes for a living. I did see on the back cover that she holds a PhD in English Lit with a focus on Brit Lit, and so it would only stand to reason that the novel would be thick with interesting facts. The good thing is that she knows how to take those facts and wrap them up within a wonderful tale, instead of hitting us over the head with them, as many historical authors do. Every time I picked up the book to read a few chapters, I felt as though I’d stepped into a time machine and been deposited next to the characters on the English streets where they reside.
Impossible Saints, which takes place during the early 1900s, is only a fraction of time in an era of suffragettes and their advocacy for women’s rights. And yet Harwood somehow manages to saturate such a short amount of time with every nuance of the era. She engages the reader with her insights of religion (not everyone is a believer of god), sex (yes, our great grandmothers enjoyed it, too), and the everyday conversations between early 20th century men and women.
In this book, the fight for freedom goes way beyond what our high school and college history classes taught us. Without spoiling the story, Lilia, the novel’s independent and intelligent protagonist, paves the way for all kinds of freedoms, not just voting rights. She ends up in predicaments that we worry she may not overcome, and she falls in love with a man who at first glance is her opposite, but may turn out to be just what she needs.
If you are looking for a story with cliffhangers at the end of every chapter, and page-turning tension, this is not for you. Impossible Saints is a slow and methodical story, with characters doing their best to deal with a world that does not support their feelings, and most times, their decisions. Allow the characters to move you through their world, day by day, piece by piece. Sometimes books are meant to be tasted slowly, instead of gulped down without care. This is one of those books.
My only note is that there is an intense scene which comes later in the book regarding what prison was like for those women who were arrested for their loyalty to independence, and I wish I’d seen more of it sooner, and perhaps with even more detail. But that’s just me. Other than that, this is a near-perfect book both in description of the era and ideals of another time. A time in which women had to fight for everything they had, and for everything they wanted for their futures and the futures of other women.
What amazed me most as I read Impossible Saints is the fact that so much of this story is relevant today. In a way, it is a testament to how little people’s ideas have really changed, even after so many years.