Olive: A Novel

A nurse notices a slight curve at the top of the newborn’s spine, and Olive Rothesay’s life is decided in that moment. Her mother Sybilla, vain and frightened, keeps the fact from Captain Angus Rothesay while he is away in Jamaica. Craik spends the rest of the novel on what that early rejection does and does not settle. Olive grows up assuming marriage is closed to her, teaches herself to paint, and becomes a working artist with an income of her own, an unusual fate to grant a Victorian heroine. She also pulls the Scottish minister Harold Gwynne back from a crisis of religious doubt, and marries him. Underneath runs Christal Manners, who proves to be Olive’s half-sister by a West Indian woman of mixed descent, tying the family’s respectability to colonial slavery.