First impressions review: The Pull of the Stars, by Emma Donoghue
That’s what influenza means…Influenza delle stelle – the influence of the stars. Medieval Italians thought the illness proved that the heavens were governing their fates, that people were quite literally star-crossed.
Confession time: I bought this book as a Christmas present for my mom, who is an epidemiologist, because it focuses on three women working in a Dublin maternity ward during the 1918 flu pandemic. And then I thought “Well, I don’t need to mail this immediately, and it sounds interesting. Let’s see how much of it I can get through in a week". I devoured it in one day! The story itself only covers three days, but so much happens in that time.
Julia Power is a nurse and midwife working at a hospital that is highly understaffed due to a combination of the pandemic and WWI, and living with her shell-shocked brother. Her patients are pregnant women who also have the flu – an extremely vulnerable population. On the day the book begins she gets two new colleagues. Doctor Kathleen Lynn is a charitable and highly skilled physician…and also a “socialist, suffragette, anarchist firebrand” who’d taken part in the Easter Rising of 19161, and may be wanted by the police. Bridie Sweeney is a volunteer, strangely ignorant but very keen, with a natural bedside manner and brilliant red hair. She and Julia quickly become very close- she was what the poster called ‘a person one needs to see’ – and Julia is angry and horrified to learn why the clever Bridie knows so little of the world, why she reacts to simple things like the gift of a comb with such warmth and gratitude.
Reading this book in our current pandemic, there was much that felt familiar, such as people flinching at sneezes and debating whether it was worth wearing masks, an overburdened healthcare system, and confusing government instructions.
The first two trams whizzed by, crammed to bursting; more routes must have been cut this week…I ducked in under the roof, where a long sticker said COVER UP EACH COUGH OR SNEEZE, FOOLS AND TRAITORS SPREAD DISEASE…from what I could gather, the plague was general all over Ireland.
Fortunately, of course, we don’t have a World War to deal with on top of ours! While this book doesn’t have “action” in the usual sense, watching these women battle to keep the patients under their care alive and to deliver their babies safely is as intense and gripping as any thriller. In the case of the “maternity/fever ward” patients – and even their caretakers – the odds are not in their favor, so every victory feels hard-earned and impactful. But there are many losses along the way.
Nurse Powers was not exactly blind to the injustices of the world. Very early on, when she learns a patient had died when she was off shift, she thinks:
I called up Eileen Devine’s drooping face…(Every baby seemed to cost these inner city women a handful of teeth.) How she’d loved the hot bath I’d drawn her two days ago – the first she’d ever had, she’d told me in a whisper…Mother of five by the age of twenty-four, an underfed daughter of underfed generations…Eileen Devine had walked along a cliff edge all her adult life, and this flu had only tipped her over.
But from Bridie she gets an insider’s view of “the pipe” – the system of Magdalene laundries, mother and child hospitals, convent schools, prisons, and other institutions that just cycle the poor around, grinding them down until they die. And from Dr. Lynn she glimpses a vision of a better world that could be. She questions the cost, though, whether it is right for a doctor to pick up a gun to make that better world:
"Nearly five hundred people died"…She didn’t take offense; she looked back at me.“Here’s the thing – they die anyway, from poverty rather than bullets…If we continue to stand by, none of us will have clean hands.” My head was spinning. I said, faltering: “I really have no time for politics.” “Oh, but everything’s politics, don’t you know?”2
This story clearly imparts on the reader the importance of love and of hope, but it has a bittersweet ending. If you are looking for a happy lesbian love story, this is not that book. But I was delighted to discover in the afterward that Dr. Kathleen Lynn was not only a real person, she seems to have to fulfilled most of the dreams her fictional version hints at. She and her probably-wife3 Madeline Ffrench-Mullen got to found the better form of children’s hospital she describes to Julia4, and lived together for another twenty-five years until Madeline’s death. Dr. Lynn was briefly elected to the Parliament of the newly independent Irish Republic in 1923, but she continued to run her hospital and further campaigns for nutrition, housing, and sanitation well into her eighties! Donohue recommends the book ‘Kathleen Lynn: Irishwoman, Patriot, Doctor’, which draws on Lynn’s four decades of diaries, for those who want to learn more.
Overall recommendation: Gripping, heartbreaking, and beautifully written – absolutely check it out if you like historical fiction, and/or have an interest in the history of Ireland, medicine, and women’s rights.
1. Commemorated in the song “the foggy dew”
2. Quotation marks added for clarity. For some reason the author entirely shunned such punctuation.
3. In the “Boston marriage” sense rather than the legal one, of course
4. St. Ultan’s was the only hospital in Ireland run entirely by women.
