I have never read King Lear before, though I knew the general arc of the plot, and I am always interested in the untold stories of those in the margins of our classic literature that lie like precious gems, waiting for someone to dig them up. It was a no brainer, then, that I’d pick this up, and I’m glad I did. J R Thorp writes with a style I had not encountered before, and the majority of this book passes without direct dialogue – we are inside the Queen’s mind, and she spends a lot of time alone. The language is both stark and lyrical, evoking Shakespearean verse while reflecting the Queen’s surroundings; a nunnery in the cold north, days away from anything and anyone familiar to her. There is not much plot to the story, which starts with the memorial service held by the nuns to commemorate the deceased King Lear and his three daughters, when the Queen begins to think she may finally leave her exile now that the man who sentenced her no longer lives. She begins plans to head south, to find the graves of her family, to find her old friend Kent, but the plans she make continue to delay and she finds herself, for the first time, more involved in the life of the abbey.

The Queen’s thoughts often lapse into the past, remembering times with Lear, times with her first husband who died young, her three daughters with their whims and tempers, and all the while she tries to unravel the reason she was exiled fifteen years before. Discovering this was my main motivation to keep reading. I loved the language and the character, but I found it very slow at times, so I will admit to skipping through a chunk of the middle to get to the revelation and the consequences of it. If you like character-focused stories then this is definitely one to read!

Although I have studied multiple Shakespeare plays in my time, King Lear isn’t one I’m familiar with. I know a very brief outline of the plot but it’s not one I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading or seeing performed. However, I am a big lover of untold stories, particularly by extraordinary women and that’s why I requested this book with a very original premise.

For 15 years, Lear’s wife has been imprisoned in a convent, accused of a crime that she knows nothing about. Now the news has reached her that her husband and all three of her daughters are dead. While dealing with the mind-numbing grief of the tragedy, she is now determined to find answers. Why was she sent away? Where is Kent, her oldest friend? Can she possibly escape this world of women that has been her home for years?

Learwife is incredibly poetic. Thorp artfully describes intense emotion and vivid scenery is a beautiful, lyrical fashion. Some parts of the writing even resemble Shakespeare himself and I can’t help but think this is a deliberate replication in order to remind us where we are and who these characters are. Some scenes are very theatrical and I can almost see a production coming to life before my eyes.

Of course, there is a lot of grief and pain in the book. Our protagonist struggles to accept that the family she left behind and who she harboured hopes of being reunited with are gone. The idea of grief being a well-trained dog that refuses to leave its master’s side is a heartbreaking one but I’m sure it will ring true with so many readers who have experienced deep loss.

We also learn a little about our protagonist’s childhood and upbringing. She always knew that she would be a queen and her family prepared her for it. This required making certain sacrifices as she grew older, including friends who weren’t deemed worthy enough by her parents. The fact that she doesn’t remember her early companion’s name suggests that court life and queendom have overwritten the pure, organic connections that she formed in her youth. It’s a sad realisation but I didn’t detect any feelings of regret or nostalgia from our protagonist. She is very matter-of-fact about the path that her life has taken and that may have been why I found it hard to warm to her.

She has a fierceness about her and bears very little emotion towards Lear. I can’t bring myself to believe that she ever really loved him in a romantic way. Her relationship with her maid Ruth is quite strange too. Although Ruth obviously knows her queen very well and they spend a lot of time together, I didn’t get any sense of warmth between the women. I suppose this is an accurate dynamic for a certain type of queen and servant relationship but it only added to our protagonist’s cold demeanour.

Other than her daughters, the only person that our protagonist seems to bear a great deal of affection towards in Kent, her long-time friend whose whereabouts is unknown for much of the narrative. In her memories with him, we see a playful, less severe side to her, which I loved. I really wanted her to get back to that girl, who I was sure was still hiding in this stone pillar of a queen.

Our protagonist talks about her first marriage and husband a lot too. For her, being married is full of suffering and pain. She feels thoroughly worn down by her life and therefore, she is very much a product of her time and social status. She would have certainly been much happier if it had been acceptable for her to remain single.

As many married couples were at the time, our protagonist and Lear are obsessed with producing a son. Daughters couldn’t be trusted to rule countries alone or inherit anything of worth. Perhaps the failure to have a male heir was the beginning of the end for our protagonist. Although this isn’t the reason given for her exile, I can’t help but think that it may have been a contributing factor of Lear’s decision to cast her aside, especially as it happened so soon after Cordelia’s birth.

Much of the novel revolves around life in the convent and the politics between the nuns. The time comes to select a new abbess and our protagonist is put at the forefront of this process. A bishop has been allowed to come and stay with the nuns during this time (because of course, women can’t possibly make such important decisions by themselves). His presence reminds our protagonist of how often men underestimate and wrongly judge women and their capabilities. This theme is visited several times in the book and it becomes clear that women really are perfectly fine and able to operate a peaceful, functional society without a single whiff of male influence anywhere near them.

Learwife is a unique, powerful read that amplifies the voice of a woman whose voice has never been heard before to my knowledge. It paints a picture of a stoic, headstrong woman who is dealing with tumultuous pain but refuses to let it break her. With themes of loss, grief, resilience and rebirth, Learwife is a lyrical, atmospheric book that sheds light on an untold story.

I studied King Lear for A level English Lit but you don't need to have to have done this in order to understand the story. LearWife imagines the wife of Shakespeare's King Lear and mother of his three daughters, who outlives them all This is her stream of consciousness story - interesting for Shakespeare fans.

This novel took me longer to read than any other in the past few years - it’s not just the length but the density of the language that made it feel a task at times! Very little happens in terms of plot and this is much more one for fans of style than a strong narrative - the central ‘mystery’ is easily guessable from the start and the question of who will become abbess doesn’t feel especially urgent. Nonetheless, I was absorbed every time I picked up the book and I liked the central character for the most part. It could definitely do with a good edit but if the poetic language is to your taste, I’d recommend it. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

I'm a massive Shakespeare fan so of course had to read this as soon as I heard about it, but I'd recommend this book to anyone, even if you're not so familiar with the original King Lear. The writing style is beautiful, it's a layered, complex story and such an interesting take on the 'forgotten women of literature' trope.

I know it can be classed as pretentious but I have always had a love for Shakespeare and the Renaissance period in general, so much so my MA was focused slowly on Renaissance Literary Studies. So needless to say when I became aware of a book that deals with a character within a Shakespeare play who is noticeable more by her absence I was intrigued and more than a little excited!

Exiled to a nunnery years ago, written out of history with her name forgotten Lear’s Queen hears word that changes everything. Care-bent King Lear is dead, betrayed by those closet to him and driven mad. His three daughters also broken in battle. But his Queen, well she survived and now she can tell her story.

Though grief and rage threaten to crack the very earth beneath her open, she knows she must seek answers to everything that has come to pass. What caused her to be sent away in such shame and disgrace to begin with? What of her oldest friend and ally, Kent? Most importantly what will become of her now in this place of pious women? She knows to find any peace she must reckon with her past and make a terrible choice. A choice that her destiny and the fate of the entire abbey rests upon.

Needless to say it was a gamble on J.R Thorps part but my goodness did it pay off, in my opinion. A powerful novel with an easy and beautiful style that lends itself partly to the time it is set and partly to the modern reader Learwife was a joy from start to finish. The characters are, on the whole, well balanced and created and most importantly likable. The nameless (at least for the majority of the time) heroine is not above employing tactics of the courts including manipulation where necessary to complete her goal.

Thorp manages to give a unforgettable and unique voice to a woman who has been absent for decades. A simply wonderful novel that deals with loss, renewal and how history can connect to the present.
I honestly could hardly put this down so much so I finished it within a couple of days. I will most definitely be rereading.

I like retellings and spin-offs; they’re a good way of extending the enjoyment of a story. I think this approach, though, is a rich seam: take a well-known story and find a peripheral character or even one who is missing from the original. Of course King Lear must have had a wife – he has three daughters and there’s no hint of bastardy. But what happened to her? I know little more about the Shakespeare play than it features an elderly king with three daughters. I couldn’t resist looking at the text to see what source material there is, searching for the words wife, mother, widow, banishment, adultery; there’s hardly a whisper so there is plenty of room to imagine her.
Like Lauren Groff's excellent Matrix, here we have a whole world within the convent to which the queen and her servant Ruth were exiled in a hurry fifteen years ago. The queen narrates the story in the present and reminisces of the past at court, showing us Lear as a younger man. She is not always reliable although she would disagree. I love her inconsistency, one day likening Ruth to a parsnip, the next admiring her simplicity. She is steely, a rival in formidability to the Duchess of Gloucester in Annie Garthwaite’s Cecily.
The language is so rich it rewards careful reading. One woman has a ‘statesmanlike voice’ with ‘small confidential vowels, like gifts passed between hands’; there are ‘candles, which smell of sweet mould and darkness’. And don’t we all prune the sins and plume the righteousness of those we admire?
One would not think that from this curtailed existence any suspense could be conjured. But Jennifer Thorp does just that: there is a decision to be made, actions to be chosen. Learwife could manage without much plot but there is plenty going on in the present day and in memory (I disagree here with the review in The Times). As there were at court, so too in the convent there are power dynamics and secrets. The queen is apparently desperate to leave the stifling confines of the convent yet forever delaying. You must read on to find out what comes after the hard winter.

This is one of the best "Queen" debut novels I've read in a very long time.
King Lear is dead and so is his three daughters, which only leave his banishment wife of fifteen years to take over the throne.
This is an exceptional novel that shows that every woman out there has the power to change regardless of historical relevance.
Brilliantly written

Good for people who like: close narration, historical fiction, literary retellings from the viewpoint of a different character.

Learwife tells the story of a previously unknown character - King Lear’s wife - who in this retelling was banished to an isolated convent before the start of Shakespeare’s tragedy. This book is an alternative history, giving voice to a powerful yet neglected character who was mentioned only twice in the original play. King Lear’s wife was used to the power of advising her husband and managing court. Her life in exile, surrounded by prayer and silence, is a prison she has no power to escape. Upon hearing that her husband and three daughters are all dead, she grapples with darkness and grief which could topple her into madness. Now the voice of this mysterious hidden woman can finally be heard.

‘<i>Holy girls in torchlight, scraped open with fear. Perhaps they think I have tentacles, snake-throat, a black tongue. I would bare my teeth at them; I would be mythic.</i>’

Queen Lear is a really interesting character to focus on, someone who should be powerful yet is oddly absent from the original play. Learwife seeks to answer the questions of who she is and why she is absent, and delves into her grief following the tragic end to King Lear’s story. The isolation of the convent, with its routines and inevitable hours of contemplation, is the perfect backdrop to the turmoil within the narrator. The narration is first person and close to Queen Lear’s anguish, her fractured thoughts and darkness. The prose is stark but poetic. This is not an easy read because it is close to the grief of a character so soon after losing her husband and daughters, but it is well done and engaging, and her strength comes through to give just a little bit of hope. You don’t need to be familiar with the story of King Lear to understand this book, as the parts relevant to the Queen’s story are included.

This book is fairly slow paced and introspective. Convent life centres around repetition, mini-dramas and politics, which allows the Queen a great amount of time alone with her thoughts. This focusses much of the prose around her grief, making this an emotionally heavy book which is rich and deep with its imagery. The narration is a bit vulgar at times, but it seems appropriate for her character and the tough life she has led. The line between madness and unhappiness is sometimes blurred - Queen Lear’s grief is raw and threatens to destroy both her and the convent. The characters are all flawed and complex, which comes out slowly though the trials of convent life. Politics plays a major role within its class structure and hierarchy, and this sets up interesting dynamics and dramas. Within this space women find power in a time dictated by men.

‘<i>One survives. Women find small spaces, bury themselves, show green when the season betters. Kent knew it. Saw me after Cordelia’s birth and said, Ah, mistress, death never saw you but to veer aside. And there is the green woman. And the dust rising off the road. I will get out, in my own way.</i>’

Learwife is on the literary side of historical fiction, with lyrical prose heavy with imagery. Due to the betrayal and grief of the narrator, the imagery is often visceral. There is a story, but it emerges slowly with flashbacks to her previous life in court against current life in the convent. The emotional state of Queen Lear comes through strongly, making this a memorable but difficult read. It’s not a book everyone will enjoy, but it’s one I’m glad to have read and finished. It reminded me of Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant, a novel set in an Italian convent in the 1500s. I think someone who enjoyed one would likely enjoy the other book, although Learwife is more literary. Both books have strong themes of women’s power and politics within convent life, and intense inner struggles for different reasons.

This book was reviewed by Cathy.

Thank you to Canongate and NetGalley for an advance copy of this book. All opinions in this review are my own.

Shelves: General Fiction (adult); Historical Fiction; Retellings; November 2021

A dense and complicated story, its origins coming from within King Lear and that play sits as a group of ghosts behind the narrative from the beginning, getting much stronger and more compelling as the story progresses.
In the suffocating atmosphere of a priory, Lear's wife passes her years of exile in isolation, until disease and disruption affect the nuns and impact her own position.

As her mind disintegrates in a way that mirrors and is enhanced by Lear's own madness, she goes back over her life, loves and losses and calls herself to account.

This is very powerful and intense writing, and draws a fascinating picture of who Lear's wife might have been.

I feel the fault lies with me probably. I've only read one or two Shakespeare works in my time and even then needed translations and glossaries. This is written in quite an old fashioned way I think, which, to me, seemed to stretch the story unnecessarily. The story itself was interesting. I'd love to know who Michaeland his brother were and their relationship to Lear. I'd really have enjoyed finding out more about where J R Thorp found her characters.

Writing a book about King Lear's wife, whom Shakespeare told us nothing about, was a wager to say the least, but J.R. Thorp has managed to pull it off brilliantly. Not only is the explanation she imagines for Lear's wife's absence in the famous play utterly convincing, but the writing itself is mesmerising. It's a dark tale that doesn't read quickly but that draws you in, page after page. The kind of book that makes booksellers jealous of readers who have more time to let themselves be absorbed by such a powerful story.

In 'Learwife' ,J.R Thorp draws upon Shakespeare's play, and conjures up a clever, flawed and ambitious queen cloistered behind convent walls. Nursing the anger and rejection from her exile, she hears of the death of her husband and three daughters. Assailed by grief and a range of other emotions time compresses, and the nameless queen mangles events from her past with the troubles faced by the nuns. A contest for power ensues.

This is an incredibly clever and absorbing novel. Thorp's writing style isn't initially easy to connect with, but it had huge lyrical power and conveyed the emotion of the novel brilliantly. The queen is a complex character, and Thorp highlights how her actions during her daughter's childhoods shaped their destruction. It felt like a novel that would have been sweated over, and each word carefully chosen. I would recommend.

DNF for me. Very poetic writing that I think you need to be in the right mood for, but also I could tell there would be no joy in the book. Having struggled through The Matrix a few weeks ago, which also was based with a woman in a nunnery, I decided this one wasn’t for me.

DNF at 35%

(As per my review policy, I do not leave a review or star rating on books I DNF. The star rating on NetGalley is just for the purpose of completing the feedback form.)

Beautiful prose - so poetic. It flows over the reader carrying one along on a dreamlike journey. Lear's wife, unnamed otherwise, has spent fifteen years banished to a convent for an unknown crime. When word comes that Lear and all her daughters are dead, she desires to be free, to escape her imprisonment. Slowly, she involves herself in the life of the convent, thinking this way she can make her escape. She makes friends and enemies and is asked to cast the deciding vote for the new abbess.

Harking back to past lives, previous times, when she was twice a king's wife, a strong, powerful woman, she reflects on what might have brought her to this pass. She survives sickness, fire and a cold cold winter; votes are cast; lines are drawn; but her support comes at a price.

This is a marvellous piece of writing.

I absolutely LOVE stories written from the perspective of "absent women" in literature. This tale was fascinating, heartbreaking, and absolutely unforgettable. Thank you so much for the ARC!

J.R Thorp’s debut novel Learwife is one of those books with a title that tells you exactly what you’re getting before you even crack the spine, and what fascinating promise that one-word title holds. The wife of King Lear, mother to his three daughters, is a classic missing part of the story, not even remembered within the play that made her family famous. Anyone with a passing interest in Shakespeare will be intrigued by what this novel could hold. And, for the most part, Thorp delivers on some solid ideas and creates a very believable world for this missing matriarch.

We join the eponymous ‘Learwife’ (who remains unnamed for almost the entire novel) at the convent to which she was banished fifteen years before the events of the play, King Lear. She has received news of the deaths of her husband and daughters (spoilers, I suppose!), and wishes to go home to find the place where they have been buried. She never knew the crime she is being punished for and thinks the end of Lear should be the end of her banishment. Forces conspire to keep her at the convent, and she remains as trapped as ever, looking always for a means of escape.

If it sounds like there isn’t much to the story of Learwife when you are right; the queen spends much of her time thinking on her previous life, from before her imprisonment, and looking ahead to the day she will finally be able to leave. Much of the plot comes from a disastrous event that shakes up life at the convent and puts the queen in a position of power unlike anything she has enjoyed for the fifteen years previous. But the majority of the novel is reflective, full of long passages of poetic longing as the queen searches for the reason that she was forced to leave the kingdom and her daughters. If you read last year’s highly successful Hamnet and wished for even more lyrical prose than Maggie O’Farrell dished out, then Learwife is certainly the novel for you. The Shakespearean connection cannot be ignored in this case when the influence appears to be so obvious.

However, if you find such long sections of metaphor and poetry to be difficult to sustain your focus for then Learwife will, conversely, seem like a bit of a challenge. It has to be read with purpose, slow and deliberate, giving yourself time to dissect the rich imagery that Thorp presents to her readers. Such reading will definitely not be everyone’s cup of tea. There are some moments where I wished for just a little more movement in the story, to drive things forward – and I am a reader who tends to appreciate this kind of reflective novel. If you look for novels that present conclusions to the story then Learwife will leave you wanting.

But ‘Learwife’ herself is an interesting narrator, and one who is worth sticking through the slower passages with. For someone who spends a lot of her time thinking on her lot in life, she seems remarkably unperceptive when it comes to herself. She is constantly wondering why she was sent away to the convent, but to me it seemed as though Thorp was telegraphing the reason very early on, and it was confirmed near the end of the story. Assuming that this was deliberate on Thorp’s part, it speaks to a woman who has had to learn to be reflective, and still has much of the skill to master – just as one might expect from someone born and raised in privileged security. The queen is very carefully rendered, and as we learn more about her, we should like her less. But by the end of the story, she still has our sympathies.

Learwife is a difficult novel to discuss. As historical fiction goes, it is curiously lacking in specificity of time and place, giving a dreamlike, unanchored feel to the story. But dreamlike and unanchored are also words that can be applied to King Lear itself, especially once the king starts to lose his grip on reality – so perhaps they are the perfect words to describe Learwife too.

‘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.’

News has finally arrived to the abbey that King Lear and his daughters are all dead. Exiled to the nunnery many years ago by her husband, the exiled and forgotten queen has to come to terms with this devastating news. She finally gets to tell her story.

King Lear has always been my favourite Shakespeare tragedy ever since I first studied it at school. I loved the drama, the tragic characters and the appropriately wild and stormy setting that Shakespeare created in his work so when I saw that a book was coming out written from the perspective of the wife of Lear, I was so excited. I also love the numerous books which have come out over the last few years giving voices to marginalised women in history and literature.

Learwife is written in lyrical prose which took a while for me to get used to and to ultimately get into the story itself. There were a number of times in the first one hundred pages where I felt that I couldn’t continue reading but I am glad that I did. It is a slow-paced read with time seeming to stand still. This does accentuate the main character’s state of mind, where she moves from clarity to periods of madness and it is hard to tell whether what she is recalling is real or imaginary. Time does seem to stand still quite a lot in this book which for me made the story drag out.

One of the most interesting elements of Learwife is the way Thorp has delved into the back story of Lear and his daughters, their early years and Lear’s relationship with both his wife and children. The sections of the book dedicated to this area were fascinating and really helped to build on what we know from Shakespeare’s work and to present the reader with a more well-rounded understanding of the characters in the play. The exiled queen is a strong and determined woman who is not afraid to use manipulation amongst the sisters in the abbey to get her way and it gives an insight into how she was as a young woman at Lear’s side.

Learwife is essentially a commentary on grief; the queen struggles with the loss of her entire family who abandoned her without cause. She has to deal with the loss of her former life as queen and also for her failing mental faculties. She too is visited by ghosts just like her husband and this juxtaposition between the husband and wife ties the play and this book together.

I had high expectations for this book and it delivered on a number of elements but the pace and the style of writing just wasn’t for me. Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC in exchange for my honest review. Learwife will be released on November 4th.

I wasn’t familiar with Shakespeare’s play of King Lear and thought it may hamper my understanding of Learwife. However, this novel is a stand alone addition/appendix to the story of Lear and doesn’t require any prior knowledge. JR Thorpe’s Learwife supposes that Lear’s absent wife has been exiled following the birth of their third daughter due to suspicions surrounding paternity. Through Lear’s wife’s self-exploration of the reasons for her exile, we are made aware of the volatility of the characters of the court which exposes some very unsettling scenes. As the novel progresses, we see the lies and deceit heaped upon Lear’s wife along with an increasing amount of pathos towards her predicament which she has no choice but to accept. The end of the novel exposes just how deep a deceit has descended upon Lear’s wife which she does not forgive. An amazing read, thank you!