The Butterfly Cabinet by Bernie McGill, Hachette, $29.99.
The first chapter sets up the classic elements of fiction. A fortress-like castle on an isolated Irish headland. A proud, wealthy family shattered by their young daughter’s death. An old retainer who finds the black-bound diary her Mistress wrote in prison and decides, finally, she must tell the truth about the girl’s tragic fate.
Yet The Butterfly Cabinet is inspired by real events that befell the aristocratic Montagu family in 1892 — events both terrible and inexplicable, when a strict but apparently devoted mother disciplined her three-year-old daughter by leaving her locked and tied in a tiny punishment room — from which she was taken three hours later, dead.
The shocked community sent the mother to gaol; she was also charged for cruelty to three of her other children. You can call her a monster, but Bernie McGill is aiming for something deeper with this novel, which explores not just the contradictory character of a stiff-necked woman, who tries yet can’t properly love her child — but the complex, high-risk business of motherhood itself. What it demands, and what happens to those who fall short.
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