The Cape Doctor

The Cape Doctor by E.J. Levy is an exemplary example of why I love historical fiction novels. E.J. Levy aptly brought forth the power of one’s respect for self at all costs through the telling of Dr. James Miranda Barry’s life. While telling the story of Barry’s life, E.J. Levy transports us into a world that’s hard to imagine in today. The complexities of right and wrong, moral or immoral, are immeasurable in this story of a life lived to one’s fullest. Having ventured throughout South Africa myself, I was able to easily envision the landscapes E.J. Levy impeccably described. This book will entice multiple emotions, which is a win win in my book. The Cape Doctor by E.J. Levy is a book I highly recommend.

I read this novel in one day.

It was a windy, gloomy day. But that is not why I read it in one day. I read it in one day because I did not want to stop reading.

I loved the narrative voice, the feeling of being transported back several centuries, the knowing wink to the style of the early 19th c in lines like “No one who had ever seen Margaret Brackley in her infancy would have supposed her born to be a heroine (or so Jane Austen might have written of her…”

I was interested in the questions the narrator struggled with, about choice and chance, gender identity, the gap between male and female autonomy and self-determination.

Which of us is undisguised, after all? Which of us reveals himself truly to the world. ~from The Cape Doctor by E. J. Levy

The Cape Doctoris based on the true story of a woman who posed as a man to gain an education and become the first female doctor. She performed the first recorded, successful Cesarean operation.

Levy’s character is inspired by the historical Barry, but Levy gives her own spin to the story, concentrating in the feminist issues. Her Dr. Perry lives as a man, but identifies as female. ( Another character is hermaphrodite, which some believe Barry was, while others believe Barry was transsexual. Those controversies do not affect my reading of this novel, as this is historical fiction inspired by true events, and not a biography.)

Under Levy’s hands, the imagined character Margaret Brackley becomes Dr. Jonathan Mirandus Perry. She tells her story of transformation from a subservient and invisible female to an authoritative and competent professional man of society.

In dire poverty, Margaret’s mother sends her to beg aid from her uncle. There, she meets General Mirandus, who takes an interest in her brilliant mind. After her uncle\’s death, the general sends her to be educated in Edinburgh’s esteemed medical school with plans for her to become his personal physician in Caracas.

Margaret cuts her hair and binds her breasts and dons a boy’s clothing. She learns to lower her voice, to change her actions and her attitude, to mimic. She learns how to masquerade, how to pass.

As Dr. Perry, she becomes a successful army doctor in Cape Town, with at least one young lady falling in love with her.

When her true sex is discovered, she has a love affair and must chose between love and her career, and more importantly, “the right to think and speak and move as I chose, not as others bade me. To experience life on my own terms.” I thought of Mary Wollstonecraft, another brilliant woman who was also against marriage, whose love affairs were scandalous.

As a first-person narrative in the style of the early 19th c., Margaret/Perry speaks to issues of identity and freedom, often in pithy epigrams, and most are quite timeless, including, “You can judge a culture by its medicine, by how it treats its most vulnerable—the ill.”

It is interesting to learn that the Cape Doctor is the name for a strong wind that today blows away the pollution over Cape Town and provides waves for perfect surfing, but which was believed to also blow away bad spirits, healing the town. And that fair weather comes after the blow.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.