All Her Lives
by Ingrid Horrocks

Before All Her Lives, her first book of fiction, Ingrid Horrocks’ publications included poetry collections and Where We Swim (2021), a book that combined memoir with travel and nature writing. Some of the threads of her nonfiction interests are visible in the nine stories here, arranged into a sequence of ideas and history that becomes increasingly cohesive. All Her Lives begins with a story set in 1919, and the aftermath of a war and epidemic; it ends ‘now’ in the aftermath of an epidemic. Along the way the stories take in major events and issues and events – Plunket and eugenics; the 1981 Springbok tour and anti-nuclear protests; feminism, activism and idealism – in narratives constructed with deliberation, passion and varying degrees of subtlety.

In the first, ‘Evie on Branch’, an army nurse returns from Europe and the Great War to the family farm in New Zealand. Her father died of cancer while she was away; her brother now shares the homestead with a wife Evie hasn’t met, and their new baby. The pleasure of being back in her familiar landscape is fraught by her experience away:

Did homecoming have to be this, too? Being outside, the sky turning velvet above the brims of the mountains, nothing moving but the water and the night birds, a couple of bleating sheep – and a sudden noise conjuring fragments of flesh, shattered faces. Mud. Stench. Homecoming was remembering a man with a bullet in his chest and his eyes on your face. It was pulling a wound closed, stitching two layers together and hoping it would hold, new skin growing into old.

The story’s title refers to a photograph taken by Evie’s brother, with her posed on a trunk fallen across a stream, the ‘tree’s great roots stuck skyward in a strange tangle of limb and sinew’. Horrocks is very good at painting physical environments with broad brushstrokes and detailed drawing alike. Water and stone recur as motifs. Evie tells Mae, her new sister-in-law that she missed the river when she was away; Mae says on the farm, away from the coast, she misses the sea. On Evie’s return, after crossing oceans, she ‘couldn’t wait for a proper wash; she thought of putting her feet in the farm stream, the cool rinse of fresh water’.

In ‘Concrete Box’, set in 2017, water is a downpour –‘so much rain’ – and a the promise of escape for Rosa, a single mother of two small children living in a leaky flat.

The dehumidifier Dad had bought on one of his rare visits chugged away, but it wasn’t doing much good. The windows were soaked inside as well as out […] I let myself slip away into a doze, thoughts softening, floating off into fragments of a dream, still with Mia attached to me, Joey in a pouch like a baby wallaby, his head furry, all of us flown somewhere else, to a warm sea or bath, a young tiger kneeling to Mia, great wet tongue licking her face.

The permutations of water and stone are at their most elemental in the collection’s centrepiece story, ‘The Silver Ship’, set in 1795: it falls between the cluster of historical and state-of-the-nation stories, and a trio of more recent socio-historic scenarios. The story begins with a boat ‘on the open water, hazy rain and mist closed in’ and the central character is the godmother of modern British feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft, before her marriage to William Godwin. In 1795 Wollstonecraft is a free-thinking republican involved with an opportunist bounder, Gilbert Imlay – ‘bodies touching, damp twisted sheets’. They have a young daughter, Fanny, and a fake marriage. Both are unwisely embroiled in the French revolution and Imlay’s plot to smuggle silver.

Horrocks draws on Mary Wollstonecraft’s letters and her epistolary travel book to recreate the venture, and she allows her protagonist much time for introspection about her work, her daughter, and her disgrace of a lover. Her relationship with Imlay disintegrating, Mary takes Fanny to Scandinavia to retrieve the missing booty. But it is a ‘wretched, crooked wrong-headed business’ and there is nothing to find here but ‘water and rock’ and the temptation ‘to let the waters close over her ––– skirts spread like fallen wings, drinking in water, pulling her under and down – a dropped stone to her dark, untroubled tomb’. This temptation conjures up images of the ending of The Piano, but as in Jane Campion’s film, the heroine comes back up for air and sails away:

As they lifted on the waves, she felt something of a future – not yet visible but possible – her bruised heart letting go, becoming porous […] She felt part of the sky, the sea, the deck beneath her feet, the rolling, oil-skinned creatures sunning themselves in the waves, the men working the sails.

Wollstonecraft also gets the last word in the collection’s final story, ‘The Silver Ship II’, presented as a ‘Conversation Fragment’. It reads like a prose poem imagining a dialogue between the spirits of Wollstonecraft and her daughter with Godwin, Mary Shelley:

Afternoon, late summer. Between small islands and rocks,
two women appear, rowing a boat, their hair wet.

The sound of water passing for their passage, like a glass
being endlessly emptied and refilled.

An unseen speaker begins.

 

Wait. Pause a little longer. Bathe again amongst the rocks, jellyfish between your fingers, water bearing you afloat.

The conversation is often surreal, quoting or paraphrasing many other texts – including Wollstonecraft’s letters, a note from Fanny left on her suicide in 1816, and phrases from Jane Eyre and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. ‘The main ghost text,’ the author tells us in end notes, ‘is, of course, Frankenstein and Mary Shelley’s creature of distorted proportions’.

The book’s title is All Her Lives rather than All Their Lives. The main character in each of these stories is female: men are brothers, fathers, husbands, colleagues, functionaries, sons or supporting cast (not that they’re always much support). Some are rejected – most overtly in ‘Marvellous Instruments’, set in Wellington in 1955.  A woman named Kenna is the narrator; her father was the gardener at Plunket founder Truby King’s Melrose estate, ‘the blue sea glistening below’. Kenna and her siblings grew up in a cottage there, thinking ‘everything in the garden belonged to us’.

To them Truby King is ‘the Doctor’, a ‘tiny old man’ and ‘mythical hero’ who invented a ‘system of Mothercraft’. But there is something sinister too. In the Doctor’s library, young Kenna learns he believed women ‘needed to be observed, organised and instructed’.

Apparent brilliance could lead directly to mental collapse, even insanity for those with fragile minds. Being physiologically weak, women did not have the spare energy for brain work. Nature did not intend for women to do the sciences; such study would unsex her, render her sterile, unfit for maternity, unable to bear a baby, unable to suckle one.

This, Kenna realises, ‘was like walking into the centre of a conversation I had been aware of all my life but had been trying very hard not to hear’.

Diana, the Devonport naval wife in ‘The End of the Fair’ is acutely conscious that ‘right here, inside my own body, was the smallest flicker of watery life’. This very personal flicker is nurtured even as Diana and her ‘commie friends’ busy themselves with the anti-nuclear protests of 1981, because Horrocks’s characters all live their lives in context. The next story , ‘Women’s Choice Night’, takes us to 2005 and Berlin, ‘the coolest city in the world’. Elieen and partner – Diana’s son, Ben – experiment with sexual freedom, echoing Mansfield’s ‘Marriage a la Mode’; they make a truce, at last, by showering until they are ‘naked and clean’.

This piece and another of the contemporary stories, ‘Murmuration’, can feel like an idea in search of characters rather than the other way round. In ‘Murmuration’ the personal is motherhood, the political is ecoterrorism and the element is air rather than water. Madeline, one of Diana’s Devonport friends from the ‘activist days’, now has a vocabulary that includes concepts like triangulation, livestreaming, Teslas and helicopter parenting.

Varied in length and narrative framing, the stories of All Her Lives are classic, in a sense, each moving towards a consistent epiphany: the archetypal women of this holistic sequence jettison the notion of what constitutes their proper sphere. Some of the fact-based stories feel too heavy on historical or political information, and too heavy-handed with metaphor. The greatest pleasure in Horrocks’  fiction is the way the collection’s preoccupations and characters keep surfacing, encouraging re-reading and re-evaluation of otherwise discrete pieces. She weaves them into the wide world promised by the book’s title and its insistence on women finding their own places.