Grace

I bought Grace on impulse from Brotherhood Books because I love Jill Paton Walsh, even though I knew nothing about the book. It's a young adult novel, published in 1991, telling the story of 1830s heroine Grace Darling. I knew the broad outline of her feat -- that Grace, a lighthouse keeper's daughter, had helped to row a boat to rescue survivors from a shipwreck, and became famous enough to have a pub in Collingwood named after her, on the other side of the world -- but no more than that.

Maybe because I had no expectations, I thought Grace was amazing (see what I did there). The first part of the novel faithfully recounts the events of the rescue and what followed: Grace swiftly became a folk heroine, an exemplar of courage and strength which went against Victorian expectations of what a young woman could achieve. In the second part of the novel, Paton Walsh allows herself to imagine more freely the effect of this sudden and overwhelming attention on Grace, who was only twenty two, though she sticks to historical sources where they're available. Grace is showered with gold medals, public concerts raise money for her, she receives thousands of letters and gifts, all of which require a reply. 

The dark side of this fame is something that I had never suspected. An official lifeboat from the mainland also set out to rescue the survivors from the rock, but arrived there just after Grace and her father had plucked them to safety. Though they were equally brave and faced the same violence of sea and storm, lifeboat crews were rewarded according to the number of survivors they saved, and the Darlings had gazumped them. Grace and her father did their best to make sure that the crew were also recognised and paid for their efforts, the avalanche of public attention and money heaped on Grace caused bad feeling in the local town. In Paton Walsh's story, Grace becomes increasingly tormented that she might have performed her brave deed for the sake of the reward, not from pure altruism. Tragically, Grace died from tuberculosis only a few years after the Forfar rescue.

I found Grace a totally engaging ethical and moral examination of fame and courage, and the consequences of celebrity. As Grace herself recognises, it became impossible for her to marry -- she was too rich to be a suitable mate to a simple, ill-educated fisherman, but at the same time, she was too socially lowly to marry a man from a higher station in life. She became famous all over the world, but her fame was a terrible burden from which she could never be free. This was an unexpectedly moving and thought-provoking novel.