A brilliant book from an original concept. It was, however, not an easy one to read. Not a great deal happens, the lack of action where Lear’s Queen is residing leaves her to think, philosophise and mourn for what she has lost. The complexity and beauty of the language is at times, breathtaking. This can sometimes almost tip over into the realms of being verbose and excessive. The books shortcomings are far outweighed by its plus points,. A beautiful read.

"I am the queen of two crowns, banished fifteen years, the famed and gilded woman, bad-luck baleful girl, mother of three small animals, now gone. I am fifty-five years old. I am Lear's wife. I am here. I am here. History has not taken my body, not yet."

(4.5) I loved this book. It's easily one of my favourite ARCs I have been sent (thank you to Canongate Books). It is a bit of a slow burn, and maybe not to everyone's taste, but as someone who has studied King Lear multiple times now, I enjoyed it immensely. The writing is very lyrical, almost a little overwhelmingly so at times, but very poetic and striking. Also, the book cover is beautiful.

Rooted in the tale of King Lear, Learwife is not just a compound adjective of a title, but the story of a woman compounded between her isolation, and the memories of the family that are now truly lost to her.

This in an incredibly lyrical, poetic and dense story. But it can be summarised quite simply - King Lear's wife, banished to a nunnery for unknown reasons 15 years ago, hears of her family's tragic death and crumbles into grief and memory. But the abbey is thrown into quarantine before she can visit the graves of her family, and instead finds herself holding a court of nuns.

In lots of ways, it's an incredible piece of writing - of a woman left isolated and abandoned for many years but still loyal to her husband, her crown and her daughters. Her memories grow stronger as she reflects on their birth, her twice-marriage and the prison that she has never tried to leave until Lear's death. She is a woman who is bitter and calculating, cold and loving. Does she have a touch of Lear's own madness? Or is she a capable woman trapped in a man's cage?

So much of it is really good. But the exceptional language and drawn-out story make it incredibly dense and something of a trial at times. Would making it shorter make it more manageable? Definitely. But it would also take away something quite singular from it.

An interesting imagined account based on the aftermath of Shakespeare’s King Lear and the story of his absent wife (who has been exiled within a nunnery).

I found the voice interesting and parts really reminded me of ‘The Winter’s Tale’ while remaining true to the politics at the heart of ‘King Lear’.

Learwife is a strange nightmare of a book that hooks you in and won't let go. The prose at points physically affected me. It creates an oppressive miasma that makes you feel as trapped as the Learwife of the title. In odd ways, it takes the works of Shakespeare, Camus, Kafka and, Beckett, remixing them into something stunning.

It is lyrical and compelling. As an exploration of grief and how that state of emotion colours all our memories. Learwife seamlessly veers from our protagonist boasting rhapsodically about her achievements as a queen, wife and mother to threnodies about the harm she caused and was caused to her by those she loved.

Learwife never shies away from how cruel and unfair life is. My reading of the book is that it is about a character trying to make sense of pain and reaching for those joyful moments that give us pleasure or satisfaction.

It plays with enigmas and ambiguity. How many of Learwife's memories are accurate? Is the Convent real or a metaphor for limbo?

A brilliant book and one that I think I'll come back to.

Source of book: NetGalley (thank you)
Relevant disclaimers: None
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.

This is one of those “I wish I’d liked it more than I did books” but the fact I personally didn’t wholly click with it doesn’t take away from what an impressive piece of work it is. As the title suggests, Learwife—set after the events of the play i.e. absolutely everyone is dead—is told from the perspective of King Lear’s wife, who has been banished to a nunnery for some fifteen years.

If the book teaches us anything, it’s that we shouldn’t pack royalty off to nunneries: they just fuck shit up.

But, anyway, Learwife drifts in a self-consciously untethered way through the memories of the (mostly) unnamed protagonist and her deeply constrained present—she’s essentially a prisoner, cast aside by her paranoid husband for some crime she’s unaware of committing. Though, I mean, given what Goneril and Reagan are like in the play … it’s not wholly impossible to imagine what exactly went down.

The book, for me, was infinitely more engaging and propulsive in its second half: essentially, once we’d gone full Lear, complete with nunnery power games, the blinding of faithful retainers, and swooping, literary madness. The first half is pretty slow, but that feels a point-missing complaint to make about a woman stuck in a nunnery. One of the themes of the book, after all, is the limitations placed on women’s lives and the dangers of forcing them to fit those limitations, fighting each other (mother and daughter, nun on … uh other nun) for whatever scraps of power and agency they can scrape from the world. Given this context, I kind of wish there’d been more scenes (memories) of the protagonist and her daughters: given the way they were raised, it’s no wonder they turned out as they did. I confess I always felt kind of vaguely on-side with Goneril and Reagan—I mean, I know they did bad shit and gouged a guy’s eyes out—but look at their dad. And now, look at their mum. Intriguingly, Cordelia is as absent as she is in the play: fragile and abstractly virtuous, a kind of invitation to irrelevance.

The writing here is super rich, almost overwhelmingly so at times—but it’s the kind of book that invites that kind of writing. Once again, by the second half it felt less like it was dragging everything down, and more that it was enhancing the nature of the story. In a weird, I guess, I had a very similar reaction to Learwife as I have to Lear itself: I don’t feel particularly warm towards it, and I fidget my way through the first two acts, but the ending leaves me breathless with aporia as much as catharsis.

Shakespearean in its weight and richness of language, a testament of womanhood, of the strength of a woman who has seen and experienced a vaulted life and a confined life. She has known love and lack of it. She has lost two kings and three daughters, her regal status and friendship, and is kept in ignorance of her crime. Locked away for fifteen years in a convent and in limbo, her identity merely guessed at, and nameless, she reveals her past life and loves to us, and also to those who share her life. Living through other trials and tragedies, she shows her strength and her vulnerability, she wishes to leave and cannot.
Although this feels like it should be a dark tale of a Queen’s demise, I found myself really enjoying this imagining of a life from Shakespeare’s King Lear. It is startling and funny how the convent life reveals the nuns’ humanity, in a not very flattering light. They are prone to jealousy and competitiveness, and the male characters don’t fare much better. Almost all of the men are flawed and weak, and show disloyalty at every turn. The characters are a rich source of all that life can show.
I really want a copy to keep, although I give most of books away these days. I want to pick it up and dip into chunks of it, and it will stay with me for a long time.

Learwife was definitely an interesting book. I always enjoy retellings of myths and classics, and was excited to read a book that retells one of the Shakespeare plays I enjoy most but from a women's perspective. There was so much potential here. I thought the writing was beautiful and so atmospheric, I could visualise every scene very clearly and you can tell Thorpe is a poet, the word choices are interesting and sometimes startling in a way that works well with the story being told. I would be interested to know why the time period was changed, from Lear which is pre Christian traditionally, not just pre Christian in the UK but hundreds of years BC, to being an early monestry. It reminded me of Eleanor of Aquitaine and I thought perhaps this Learwife was based on her.
What I struggled with though was the plot of this book. There wasn't much of one and while I often enjoy books with no plot the repetitive nature of this book became something of a slog to read. While I can see the themes of captivity, I became reluctant to pick up a book that felt like it was going nowhere, and was sometimes prettily written scenes strung together which out much substance. It didn't work for me as well as I had hoped.

Learwife was so much more than I expected it to be. I’ll be honest: I haven’t read King Lear, and I thought I’d struggle to understand this, and the fact that I’ve recently read The Queens of Innis Lear by Tessa Gratton (and really enjoyed it) I thought would confuse me more (the Queen isn’t sent to a nunnery in TQoIL). I needn’t have worried though.

This book is narrated by the former queen, whilst she’s living in the convent, reflecting on her time as a queen two times, as the wife of Lear, and a mother to her three daughters. Even though she has been exiled from her former life and forbidden from seeing her daughters for a very long time, when she hears of their deaths she’s devastated. She imagines that she can see their ghosts. She comes close to madness herself. This is a very human woman, not just a queen. In fact, most of the other women living in the convent, don’t know that she was once their queen. They do know that she was a woman of status, and they defer to her - not least because of her steely demeanour. She’s a formidable woman.

This did take me longer than usual to read, but there were several factors involved in this: taking in the gorgeous prose, and the fact that I desperately needed reading glasses (which I now thankfully have! 🤭). It really is beautifully written, and I think that it’s going to be one of those rare books that I’ll read again.

In the vein of a lot of fiction in recent years giving a voice to the women history has written out of the picture, Learwife imagines the story of the wife of King Lear, who doesn't get a mention in Shakespeare's play. Starting when the news of her husband and daughters' deaths reaches her in the monastery to which she had been exiled years before, the novel explores her back story through her grief.

I must say I persisted with this book but it didn't really engage me fully. It started powerfully, with a queenly, rather arrogant woman who has been cooped up in a monastery in the North for years without even knowing the reason why, finally seeing the end of her imprisonment in sight. She formulates a plan to visit the graves in Devon, but as winter sets in and an unnamed illness sweeps the monastery, her escape/release is endlessly deferred and her musings become increasingly deranged.

The revelations about her parenting style, based on cruelty and detachment, and her elder daughters' unspeakable characters, are painful but fascinating. However, the complete lack of a narrative drive and her unpleasantness as a lead character, ultimately meant that I found the book rather boring. It isn't very long but it took me forever to get to the end, and I kind of wish I hadn't bothered. The writing is excellent, but it takes more than that to hold this reader's attention.

DNF, the story is plodding and I did not enjoy the voice of the protagonist and the constant self pity

I'm not going to rate this one* since I abandoned it at 6%, and can quite see why it might appeal to people who a) love this kind of "creative writing" and b) love reading about grief. I'm not that person. I require a story and some forward momentum, and my tolerance for sugary self-indulgent prose is low. Especially when written in the never-ending, ever more tedious first person, present tense.

Could I respectfully plead with all authors that they get out of their characters' heads and start telling stories again? And stop grieving. Please stop grieving. There is enough grief in life without it being inflicted on us endlessly in fiction. Thank you.

*Obviously I am forced to rate it here on NetGalley, and since I couldn't bring myself to read it I can only give it one star. I would much prefer to be able to choose not to rate a book at all.

I was sent a copy of Learwife by J.R. Thorp to read and review by NetGalley. This is a beautifully written foray into the life and mind of the wife of King Lear. The protagonist has been incarcerated by her husband, the King, in a nunnery for 15 years when we meet her. Throughout the story we accompany the exiled Queen in her day-to-day life and learn of her innermost thoughts and memories. There is no speech punctuation, just some lines in italics which would ordinarily annoy me but seems absolutely right in this context. This is a lyrical, grown up novel with a great sense of time and place that only narrowly missed out on the full 5 stars from me.

Thanks Netgalley and Canongate for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This was such an extraordinary piece of work. King Lear's wife gets only a small mention in Shakespeare's play, Learwife takes that small mention and turns it on its head, producing a novel exploring the newly widowed wife as she is told that her husband and daughters have all been killed. Learwife, having been in exile at a convent for years, navigates through the aftermath of this news and what it might now mean for her, previously forgotten and scrubbed from history.

This was fascinating. Learwife is a women who has more or less lived as if a ghost during her exile and whilst she is clearly bereft, she is now awakening in some way. The writing style was, admittedly, a little hard for me to get into. BUT, it's undeniably beautiful. Written in first person and in present tense, the reader experiences each point in real time and it can feel extremely personal, and at times uncomfortable. If you're not a fan of speech without quotation marks, you may need some time to settle in.

Things that I liked:
- Beautifully written, almost lyrical.
- The dynamics between characters. Learwife and Ruth her maid in particular are a bizarre but interesting duo.
- Women getting stuff done without men being a perpetual theme throughout.

Things I didn't like
- I think in the aim to be poetic/lyrical Thorps tends towards repetition and at times kind of overdoes it in my opinion. The book could have been a little shorter because of this.

Read if you like(d):
- Character driven pieces such as Circe, Matrix and Eleanor Oliphant
- Shakespeare
- Beautiful, quotable prose

Will I reread? I'm not sure. Probably not, it feels like a one-timer to me.

This fascinating concept shines the spotlight on a character traditionally in the background: the wife of King Lear, Shakespeare’s tragic anti-hero and mother of his three infamous daughters. She only appears in two vague references (one to her being dead) in the original play, yet is given her own voice in this genre-defying debut from J.R. Thorp. We meet the 55-year-old queen in the convent she was banished to 15 years prior – just after the birth of her youngest, Cordelia – and told to ‘pray for the soul of the king’. Accompanied by her maid Ruth, she learns, like someone waiting outside the theatre doors of the tragic play, about the multiple deaths which have unfolded. Her husband and daughters are dead, her family disgraced – and she reels under the waves of grief, thrust into the knowledge of this harsh new world, while still physically locked within the convent’s walls. She reminisces about old conversations with her husband, her life in court, and – assuming she’s now free to go – makes plans to leave to find her family’s graves, and perhaps seek out her old friend, Kent. “I have been so quiet,” she says. “I have done my penance fivefold. Nobody could tell me for what, and I took the punishment in any case, because the king my love required it.” Her requests to leave are blocked by the abbess, who asks the nameless queen to stay, pointing out the hazardous and futile nature of the journey. The royal mother unwillingly agrees, stalking the walls, turning events over and over in her mind, in beautifully transporting prose that almost read like modernist poetry in places. The shards of meaning in her sentences only become clear when you let the words wash across you, slipping effortlessly between narrative and memory, sense and nonsense. The subjectivity of madness and how to recognise it in others is one of the brightest themes woven into this beautiful book.

The queen makes further attempts to leave, but sickness comes to the convent and the nuns are locked in quarantine together until Lent, faced with the all-too-real possibility of death at any moment. The abbess sickens and dies, lying in a “cave of her madness” for days, before leaving the convent rudderless. The remaining women jostle for power, while Thorp’s queen – outside the system, yet still within the walls – reigns supreme, sharing stories from her past, slipping into the present and back again. “And women last,” the queen observes. “Men rise and fall in sheaves, every season shaving down a new crop – war, honour. Women are weaker but we last: we sink into age, grow long bones, tell stories, hoard four score and ten. We get old and hairy and forget naught.” This immersive, wonderfully constructed book spans grief, love, duty and power, and is a must for anyone who enjoys feminist-focused reimaginings.

Featured in Book Club in the November 2021 issue of Cambridge Edition magazine

'Under the crack of this grief I feel myself slipping out into other forms: animal, vegetal, sea-spill foam, winter wind, a boar roaring blue in the dark. Then at least I would fit the tales: story-woman, death's head, corrupting flesh at the touch. Oh, I know them, every ghost has good ears.'

This is a beautifully written and powerful imagining of the wife of King Lear, who merits only a passing mention in Shakespeare's play. Opening as the news of the death of her husband and three daughters reaches her at the convent where she has been in exile for years, the book explores the grief and shock of her new situation. The book is written in the first-person, present tense, which gives the book an immediacy and a very deep personal resonance. As she is about to leave, an outbreak of the plague shuts the convent down and the queen's personal life slowly starts to mirror that of her late husband.

And yet... For me, despite the sheer talent that J.R. Thorp exhibits, there is a sense of over-writing here. There is too much repetition and, well, 'wordiness'. She keeps writing about leaving the convent - frankly if she had just done it then she would have got out before the plague outbreak! One newspaper critic, in their review, called it the self-indulgence of a debut novel which desperately needed a good editor. I 100% agree. For all the linguistic and emotional power, the book needed to be shorter to pack the proper punch, and it probably didn't need to over-use the motifs and themes of the original play quite so much - which is why I come in at only 3 stars. I do, however, very much look forward to seeing what's next for the author.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.)

I enjoyed reading this tale concerning Lear's widow and her story. It travels backwards and forwards through time to cover the period she was married to him (and briefly her first marriage) as well as talking about her daughters. All of whom died. The setting of a nunnery - or convent - was an interesting quirk. I would advocate reading this book with an open mind. the writing is excellent. the story is utterly believable.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

This isn't an easy read novel - you need to be prepared for density of both prose and ideas. But it rewards those who persevere. I must admit I'd never realised that King Lear's wife is never mentioned, but Thorp brings her character to life beautifully in her imagined exile. The Queen isn't a likeable character but that makes the story all the more fascinating. A power struggle between king and queen, mother and daughters, nuns and abbess. The prose is beautifully written and I hope to read more of Thorp's work.

The story ends with the death of King Lear and his daughters, a tragedy, yet one member of the family is still alive, Lear's wife, imprisoned in an abbey for fifteen years. She no longer knows her own name but the Queen is still a queen and holds power as the abbey is quarantined and the old abbess dies. Still manipulative she muses on her past and the reasons why she was forsaken whilst plotting her escape.
This is an absolutely brilliant book. It takes the Shakespearean tale of King Lear and offers a side-story which is completely wonderful. The Queen is an unlikable character yet as she descends into senility her story is complete. The writing is complex but intelligible, the plot clear yet wonderfully developed and poetic cadence works so well.

Since the publication of Madeline Miller's Circe, and before that the Hogarth Shakespeare series, there has been a steady stream of retellings of classic stories, tales and myths. Often the goal is to include the excluded POV, usually the feminine. In J.R. Thorps's Learwife we meet a woman completely absent from the searing play about her husband and daughters. We meet her 15 years into her banishment from court to a nunnery for no reason she can parse. With her family now dead, she must sort out her life if she is to reach any place of peace. This is a dense, troubling story without a 'happy' ending and in my opinion, is best appreciated by readers with a knowledge of the play.