Four productive decades and 17 books of fiction have secured Audrey Thomas a place in our canon, duly confirmed in 2003 by a George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award and in 2008 by her investiture into the Order of Canada. As Thomas nears her eightieth year she remains no literary idler.

Her new novel, a blend of fiction and history, returns to the African setting of earlier novels (such as Coming Down from Wa) inspired in part by two years spent in Ghana during the 1960s. Letitia Landon, “Letty” to her near and dear, is a doyenne among the soiree set of 1830s London – or she was. From the first words of this tale, Letty’s voice comes to us from beyond her African grave. She finds that death offers a certain advantage: “I can speak freely now.”

The daughter of a once prosperous merchant who lost his fortune in speculation, Letty and her siblings were raised “shabby genteel.” When her father died of a heart condition at a young age, her own work became the family’s lifeline. Not one to pursue a parlour career, she “did no embroidery, did not sing or play the piano.” Letty’s commodity was poetry: “I was considered a genius by some, a silly rhymester by others.” Either way, products like “A Sonnet Sequence on the Death of My Canary” brought a reliable income.

Flash forward. Still unattached at age 34, Letty meets Captain George Maclean at a dinner party. On leave from his post as a colonial Governor in West Africa, George comes close to declining Letty’s post-dinner invitation to tea. “She seemed a bit of a coquette, almost an ingenue in a play, but she had read my report, had taken it seriously … asked intelligent questions.”  He goes to tea. Flirtation morphs into marriage. Though Letty almost expires of nausea on the voyage out, her reward is to become chatelaine of a Gold Coast Governor’s palace: Cape Coast Castle.

The story unfolds in first-person accounts, with Letty and George cast as principals and supporting roles given to Mr. Freeman, a Wesleyan missionary, and Brodie, a colonial administrator who befriends Letty. Here and there Thomas drops reminders of Letty’s posthumous state. Gradually, we learn of the circumstances surrounding her untimely death.

Thomas constructs a romantic, sometimes comic adventure spiced up with vivid images, tropical redolence, and the lurking spectre of violence. The period ambiance and conversational rhythms are deftly captured. Thomas is especially good on the solitudes of Victorian marriage. George and Letty’s mental orbits rarely intersect. She’s giddily chatty (even in bed) while he prefers dwelling in his thoughts: “strange, is it not, how the things that attract you to someone – in Letty’s case her openness, her lively mind – can, later on, nearly drive you mad.” 

Letty desperately misses the whirl of London society. One night she muses aloud to George at dinner about their eventual return to the cosy parlours of home. George, juicing a lime, replies, “This is where I belong; this is where I’ll be buried.” Then he squirts lime juice in his eye. As we’re offered more of George’s narrative voice, his inner life comes alive for us, while Letty must deal exclusively with his armoured exterior.         

Given the time frame, the brutal African slave trade must enter this story. Thomas calibrates our sympathies, making George not an open abolitionist, but an abstainer during the slave years, then active in chasing down rogue traders after the passage of the 1833 abolition laws. Letty has the expected superior air toward  “the natives,” while her affection for smiling children can turn abruptly to offence at ill-mannered “little savages.” Still, she has the gumption to fire sarcastic barbs at George when he speaks of “benevolently” subduing and Christianizing the local tribes.

Though Thomas’s subject is primarily cultural displacement, and the cross-purposes of wives and husbands, she doesn’t neglect to insert a grim paragraph on the dungeons beneath Letty’s kitchen, where slaves once died in squalor. Her compact portrayal of the preacher, Freeman, son of a former slave and a white British mother, keenly evokes his mix of dogma and warring identities.  

The pivot for the tension between George and Letty becomes the bookish Brodie. Fed up with her round of household management and empty afternoons, Letty finds in Brodie a savvy companion to ease her sense of culture shock. Letty begins to understand that she’s in love with Brodie, who for his part is oblivious, and soon to leave for England. An ensuing ear infection leaves Letty vulnerable – and here the reviewer’s duty to withhold important plot points must kick in.

An afterword notes that the novel blends imagination and historical record. Letitia, George, Brodie, and Freeman were real, and Cape Coast Castle still stands. “I have walked … where Letty died,” Thomas says, though she refrains from stipulating whether she visited the dungeons.