From Out My Heart by Sue Rainsford: haunting exploration of motherhood, possession and bodily habitation

From Out My Heart

Author: Sue Rainsford

ISBN-13: 9781807620103

Publisher: Lilliput

Guideline Price: €16.95; 194pp

Edgar Allan Poe married his cousin Virginia Clemm in the early summer of 1836. She was 13 years old, and he 27, even if the marriage certificate listed her age as 21. Their relationship was short-lived. Virginia died of tuberculosis when she was 24.

His reputation is lasting, Poe now considered one of the great American writers. The language used to describe their relationship has been couched for decades in literary hedging, Poe’s distress at his wife’s death offered as final evidence of the sincerity of their mutual feeling.

Sue Rainsford’s new novel, From Out My Heart, takes the bare facts of this relationship as the stripped skeleton of a story whose flesh is the experience of female bodies as they become entangled in the thickets of male observation.

The whole is narrated with a ghostly soulfulness whose originary shape is the experience of motherhood, the prose weaving its sometimes isolating fabric by means of the multiple consciousness of its narrator, Phylippa. She is a graduate researcher in Boston, drawn to the rumour of a female member of a religious community in Virginia who claims to channel the spirit of Virginia Clemm Poe.

Intrigued, the narrator follows a familiar path through the landscapes of the southern Gothic, the outsider arriving in a remote valley to find an insular society governed by occult belief. The tropes are all there: sin, baptism, secrets and lies, but Rainsford arranges them with individual force, the hidden histories of her narrator a flow that joins her subjects.

The novel has definite movements, which sometimes have too indefinite a shape. Still, Rainsford’s abiding fascination with inscription, on bodies, pages, in the ground and air, holds them tight together, to haunting effect. And as with all great Gothic tales, the horrors are to be found on the inside.

Recognising these burdens as the uninvited consequence of trauma and shame gives Rainsford’s novel its particular and necessary charge. Like its sister work, Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat, From Out My Heart is a mixed media rendering of literary, visual and historical possession. It is a liberation too, from the stories that once bound Virginia Clemm, and also confined Rainsford’s narrator, but no more.

Nicholas Allen is an author and academic.