All Her Lives (yes, nifty title) is the first published work of fiction by Wellington biographer and poet Ingrid Horrocks. The nine stories are substantial pieces: up to 12,000-plus words. There’s time for a narrative to change course, characters and settings to do the same, and Horrocks makes thorough use of such possibilities.
They’re also pieces with factual underpinnings. Truby King’s Melrose garden, 1981 anti-Springbok tour protests, nuclear-free Devonport appear.
So, repeatedly and ingeniously, do 18th-century fictioneer and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughter Mary Shelley, and the latter’s Frankenstein. The book is even found lying in a fraught, late-20th-century teenager’s bedroom.
Settings switch back two and a bit centuries. In 1795, Wollstonecraft is on a ship off the Norwegian coast. In a separate narrative, she’s in a sustained, visionary dialogue with her daughter, as the two row through parting water, talking of despair, fame, “a true experiment in marriage”, assurances and mysteries, gender roles and stereotypes.
Elsewhere, World War I nurse Evie returns to the family farm to try to comprehend the death and birth, injury and recovery that have marked the place in her absence, as well as her own belonging and alienation.
In 1995, again in rural Aotearoa, commendably patient and perceptive mother Sophie listens to her daughter relate an ugly example of abuse at a hayshed party.
Ten years later, at Berlin’s Weiberfastnacht, when “women ruled supreme”, Eileen wonders about her own sexual identity and about “almost fraternal” Ben. That story builds a growing uncertainty over whether freedom equals fulfilment; then shifts to (no spoiler here) a vomiting, giggling, showering, happyish ending. And in “Now” – the time, not the title – Madeleine, also from Devonport, crosses half the world to a prison where she can talk with her rope-hanging, bridge-blocking, climate-activist son.
Men are mostly marginal. That’s an observation, not a criticism. When they appear, they’re rendered credibly. That includes their uglier moments: laughing raucously around a staffroom table; condescending at a public meeting; abandoning then assisting the regurgitating girlfriend.
The women, as I said earlier, are forces of nature. Those forces may manifest in concealing a pregnancy, confronting male entitlement, facing the unsympathetic young, facing also the unpredictable, unsparing future, dedicating oneself to a cause.
Indeed, a number of causes, mostly political in the wider sense, appear here – plus a domestic issue with invasive rodents. Horrocks examines them via plot rather than preaching, which is always desirable, and she makes a deft job of showing the frictions and fractures that happen within even the most committed groups.
She does other things effectively as well. There’s a biographer’s awareness of defining moments or meetings, of motivation and revelation, of the social forces that shape behaviour. None of Horrocks’s characters exist in a vacuum.
Dialogue can sometimes feel a tad formal, but the writing is lucid and attentive. This may be the author’s first published fiction, but she has a heap of word usage behind her. She does the small scenes neatly, and she’s good with nuances of feeling and relationship. Any parent will recognise the stunning, sulking teenage girl “in the full blooming flare of a new-found fury”.
