How do you think this kind of society would respond to lesbian sex or for that matter to a woman who dresses like a man ? In The Essex Serpent no one so much has a second-thought about those things. Think about it- this novel is set in 1893 – in 1895 Oscar Wilde was IMPRISONED for indecency (basically for being gay). My problem with The Essex Serpent is that it fails to acknowledge that Victorian attitudes to these issues do not resemble our own. And there’s some pretty excellent novels out there exploring all those subjects. If one were to write a recipe for an award-winning literary novel in the 21st century that would basically be it. It bears all the hallmarks of fashionable 21 st-century literary fiction: feminism, bisexuality, sexual violence within marriage, mental illness in children and women, and a complete absence of guilt over extramarital sex. Despite all the lavish descriptions of its setting, The Essex Serpent is not a Victorian novel in the slightest. They do not have the ability to time travel to the 21st century.

There’s been a lot of publicity surrounding Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent last year: it was selected as 2016 Waterstones Book of the Year, it had a billboard covering an entire wall at the London Book Fair, and beer with The Essex Serpent label appeared at marketing and publicity conference.Įnthusiastic reviewers claimed that not even Charles Dickens and Bram Stoker combined could write a novel like this. Told with exquisite grace and intelligence, this novel is most of all a celebration of love, and the many different guises it can take (From Goodreads) Although they can agree on absolutely nothing, as the seasons turn around them in this quiet corner of England, they find themselves inexorably drawn together and torn apart.

But Will sees his parishioners’ agitation as a moral panic, a deviation from true faith. Cora, a keen amateur naturalist is enthralled, convinced the beast may be a real undiscovered species. They meet as their village is engulfed by rumours that the mythical Essex Serpent, once said to roam the marshes claiming human lives, has returned. Cora is a well-to-do London widow who moves to the Essex parish of Aldwinter, and Will is the local vicar. Set in Victorian London and an Essex village in the 1890’s, and enlivened by the debates on scientific and medical discovery which defined the era, The Essex Serpent has at its heart the story of two extraordinary people who fall for each other, but not in the usual way.

The essex serpent book review