"Beggin’ pardon, Miss, why’s a respectable young lady like you a-going to the Pleasure Gardens? Don’t you know they has the most prodigious bad reputation, and ain’t no place for a lady unaccompanied?" Katherine Howey’s debut novel, In Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, follows Lucinda, a young soldier’s daughter, who arrives in London in the late 1700s after fleeing the American Revolutionary wars. Lucinda begins, it seems, as a typical historical heroine: naïve, thrown into a new and unfamiliar world, tasked with learning a new job as a seamstress. Her forays into society and the meeting of a wealthy gentlemen may set a reader up to believe that a Cinderella story is about to unfold. Perhaps, after meeting with a few trifling difficulties, Lucinda will get married and all will be tied in a neat Austen-like bow? But who is the mysterious doctor, William Browne, who bursts, singing and swinging, onto the page?
The realities of being a woman in the eighteenth century, and of the harsh divisions of class in that time, become immediately apparent as Lucinda’s fairytale turns dark. A sudden and misunderstood illness strikes Lucinda, leaving her unable to perform her roles, either as a seamstress, or as an eligible woman in society. What follows for Lucinda is a Dickensian fall through the cracks of London. For a modern reader, it is clear that Lucinda’s illness resembles a chronic disability like M. E. or fibromyalgia, but to her contemporaries in the book, her illness is incomprehensible, appearing fabricated even. In Vauxhall pleasure Garden does not shy away from the traumatic realities of being a young woman, alone and disabled, in times gone by. Lucinda is not a perfect heroine, she is frequently disempowered, doesn’t know where to turn, and chooses the wrong people to trust. Nevertheless, she manages to support herself in inventive ways, and forge friendships and a life, however unconventional.
In Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens tells a story that is often missing from historical fiction, the story of a woman who did not, and who because of disability could not, follow the paths laid out for women in that time, but who managed to survive. I finished the novel, the first in a series, ready to read the second, wondering what lies ahead for Lucinda; what really happened to William Browne, will Alex Henderson find her at the Inn, and will she see Jem again?
Nancy Dawkins is a poet and musician from Leicester. Her writing has been published in print and online, including in The Leicester Literary Review and Heroica. She was shortlisted for the inaugural role of Leicester Poet Laureate in 2025, and was longlisted for the Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition 2024.
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