By Paul Carrier
The eponymous Jane Clarke of this novel is a thoughtful and independent-minded young woman living with her family on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1769 when she rejects the would-be husband her father has chosen for her.
As punishment, or to persuade her to reconsider, Nathan Clarke exiles his daughter to Boston to care for her aged and persnickety aunt Gill. But instead of changing her mind and accepting the arranged marriage, Jane moves in with her aunt, whose seeming hostility toward the British is at odds with the political views of Jane’s loyalist father.
Over time, Jane’s new surroundings define and strengthen her rebellious tendencies. Her brother Nate is a clerk for attorney John Adams, and Jane finds herself in a budding relationship with Boston bookseller (and future Continental Army officer) Henry Knox.
Chick lit? Perhaps. But such pigeonholing sells this book short. Why stick a restrictive label on coming-of-age tales featuring strong female characters? This well-researched novel has a page-turning plot and compelling characters. It grapples with ethical dilemmas, such as whether lying is acceptable in support of a worthy cause and how to cope with human duplicity. And it overflows with telling details and believable period dialogue.
On that last point, author Sally Gunning tells us in an afterword that she "needed to condition my ear to the language of the time" if she was going to write believable prose about eighteenth-century Massachusetts. So she read “every word” that John and Abigail Adams wrote to one another in their voluminous correspondence during long periods of separation.
On top of all that, Gunning is a fine descriptive writer.
“Its coat was the black of charcoal with the shine of glass,” she says of a horse, “its legs were as long and finely tuned as the railings in the courthouse at Boston; it looked down its long nose at Jane with dancing eyes full of contempt for such a poor, two-legged sufferer.”
Jane’s transformation from skeptic to patriot is far from sudden. The same is true of her adjustment to life in Boston, a noisy, congested, politically charged town whose ways contrast sharply with life in Satucket, Jane’s home town.
The Boston air was “no Satucket air, but a thing full of too-old food, too-new chamber dung, and too many kitchen fires set too close together.” Even the darkness of night is “a paler thing than it was in Satucket,” thanks to lanterns and candles that still burn “at an hour when they would have been long black at home.”
Initially skeptical of Boston newspaper accounts alleging misdeeds by British soldiers, Jane’s suspicions grow stronger still when a patriot newspaper misrepresents her harmless and innocent encounter with a friendly British sentry. The Boston Gazette unfairly vilifies the soldier to fuel the public’s hostility toward Britain and its troops.
But Jane’s perspective changes when James Otis, a leading patriot, is brutally attacked (as he was in real life), and Jane, who has rudimentary training as a nurse, is called upon to stitch up the ghastly head wound Otis suffered at the hands of his assailants. Still later, Jane witnesses the Boston Massacre, which galvanizes the town and sets in motion a series of events that will transform her life.
Gunning couples her exploration of Jane’s evolving political views with glimpses of her loneliness and sense of isolation in Boston; her tenuous relationship with her dogmatic father and secretive brother; and her continued estrangement from Phineas Paine, the man her father had arranged for her to marry. The author provides a vivid but not entirely complimentary portrait of Knox, a boisterous, cheerful fellow whose advances Jane welcomes - to a point.
“The Rebellion of Jane Clarke is about a young woman developing her critical thinking sense, learning to separate truth from fiction, learning to educate herself to the facts and make her own judgments based on those facts,” Gunning has written. Jane Clarke learns those lessons well.
