Inspired by an extraordinary court case, and featuring a real-life Victorian novelist, Smith’s funny, almost flawless new novel examines identity, the notion of truth and 19th-century England and Jamaica in flux
arly on in Zadie Smith’s exuberant new novel, Eliza Touchet – the housekeeper, cousin by marriage and sometime lover of the Victorian novelist William Ainsworth – wonders why fictional characters and events are often pale facsimiles of their real-life inspirations.
In reality, Ainsworth was once hailed as “the English Victor Hugo”, and one of his novels even outsold Dickens’s. Smith captures him in his dotage, after the money has dried up, forcing his family to change houses every few years. His novels, more than two dozen of them, have fallen out of print, and publishers aren’t too keen to “look over” his new manuscript.
At the centre of the novel, however, is another bit of “stolen truth”: the Tichborne case, still among the longest trials in English legal history. Sometime in 1866, a cockney-speaking butcher in Australia claimed he was Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to the Tichborne baronetcy, presumed to be lost at sea years ago.
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