{"id":8585,"date":"2022-01-19T12:10:27","date_gmt":"2022-01-19T12:10:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=8585"},"modified":"2022-02-02T11:55:16","modified_gmt":"2022-02-02T11:55:16","slug":"the-strange-lockdown-life-of-alice-henry-by-ann-oakley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=8585","title":{"rendered":"The Strange Lockdown Life of Alice Henry by Ann Oakley"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Linen Press 25 January 2022<\/strong><\/p>\n

266pp, paperback, \u00a310.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Zo\u00eb Fairbairns<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Alice is 74 years old, and in good health. She\u2019s hoping to keep it that way, in spite of the pandemic raging around her. She spends long hours of lockdown thinking about death, not just her own (whenever and however it may occur), but also that of an early twentieth-century women\u2019s rights campaigner called Maud Davies whose body was found in a railway tunnel in 1913, beheaded and stabbed, in a crime for which no one was ever convicted.<\/p>\n

Shielding at home, Alice searches for the truth about Maud\u2019s grisly end by Googling her way, on her laptop, through ancient railway timetables, census returns, feminist campaigning materials and crime reports. Other tasks include correcting the grammar of present-day academics for whom she works as a freelance copy-editor. It\u2019s a service of which they stand in sore need, if the examples Alice wrings her hands over are anything to go by. (If one of her professors were to write that, she would probably correct it to \u2018anything by which to go\u2019. Come to that, she would probably also prefer \u2018over which she wrings her hands\u2019.)\u00a0 You see? It\u2019s catching, just like Covid, or the BV, Bloody Virus, as she calls it.<\/p>\n

Alice is aware of the social-distancing rules she is expected to follow, and the possible risks of not doing so, but she has friends to see, a far-flung family to keep tabs on, a part-time job in a bookshop, and a male customer with whom she is hoping to go to bed. And then there is what she refers to as \u2018body housework\u2019\u00a0 – the non-virus-related medical encounters with dentists, opticians, physiotherapists, all masked, gloved, sanitized, asking questions about foreign travel, waving thermometers and taking away her handbag to lock it in a box. Isolation is hard work.<\/p>\n

As is historical research about people who lived and died long ago and in relative obscurity. Apparently quite a lot of women were murdered on trains in the early twentieth century, sometimes by complete strangers who saw a perfect opportunity in the confined carriages and the easy escape routes from stations.\u00a0 Maud might have been one such victim. Or her feminist activism might have caught the hostile attention of sex traffickers who wanted to shut her up.<\/p>\n

Alice\u2019s suspicions, obsessions, fears, amusement and neediness interweave on the pages of Ann Oakley\u2019s account of what all of us have in our different ways been going through, are still going through. One of the strangest things about Ann Oakley\u2019s book is that use of the word \u2018strange\u2019 in the title \u2013 as if everyone else\u2019s lockdown life is normal. But nothing\u2019s normal any more. Perhaps the day will come when Alice and her factual equivalents will be historic figures for future historians and fiction writers to track down and speculate about. In the meantime, The Strange Lockdown Life of Alice Henry<\/em> is oddly comforting, with lots to smile and nod at, alongside the stuff that makes you cringe and rage and shudder.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/u><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Zo\u00eb Fairbairns<\/p>\n

Alice is aware of the social-distancing rules she is expected to follow, and the possible risks of not doing so, but she has friends to see, a far-flung family to keep tabs on, a part-time job in a bookshop, and a male customer with whom she is hoping to go to bed. And then there is what she refers to as \u2018body housework\u2019 – the non-virus-related medical encounters with dentists, opticians, physiotherapists, all masked, gloved, sanitized […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8585"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8589,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8585\/revisions\/8589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}