Jennifer Falkner's Susanna Hall, Her Book

Reviewed by Amanda Earl

(Fish Gotta Swim Editions, 2022)

One of the qualities I’m looking for in historical fiction is the author’s ability to make history real for me as the reader. In this novella, Falkner succeeds in bringing one small moment in British history to life with the sharp smell of woodsmoke, the hairless, wormlike tail of a rat in the kitchen, the squeal of ropes stretching to support a straw-filled mattress, a cheek blown open by a musket ball. Falkner writes in exquisite detail, something I also had the pleasure of experiencing recently when I read her short story collection Above Discovery (Invisible Publishing, 2023) and her more recent short fiction, such as “Re-Opening Night” in Agnes and True. In other words, I have become quite a fan of Jennifer Falkner and look forward to more of her work.
 
Susanna Hall, Her Book, for me, is above all a ghost story. While it depicts three days in 1643, it also sustains the presence of Susanna’s dead family members and husbands through items that are still there or the ways in which a house can be haunted. It is this haunting that fascinates me most about the book, and the way in which the presence of the dead can still be felt by remaining loved ones. Another aspect of the book that is important to me is the bringing to life of a real woman, who wasn’t well known in history, overshadowed, I’m sure, by her famous father, and like so many women, erased from history. Falkner does a beautiful job of bringing this character to life.
 
The widow Susanna Hall, William Shakespeare’s oldest daughter, lives in New Place, his home in Stratford-Upon-Avon, with her children. She lives with the ghosts of her family in a house she questions may be haunted “by memories of its former self.” It is many years after her father’s death, but people are still clamoring for his works, including Queen Henrietta Maria, the queen of England. In 1643, during the English Civil War, as Henrietta is returning from France to be with Charles I, who decamped the royal court to Oxford, she stops in Stratford, where her entourage is attacked by those who did not support the King nor his marriage to a Roman Catholic. She takes secret refuge in the protagonist’s house, but Susanna Hall is also secretly harbouring one of the members of the resistance, shot during the attack. This makes for some interesting, almost farcical tension.
 
Susanna is a healer and has learned the skills of the apothecary, which means the book is filled with receipts, or recipes, many of them drawn from historical receipt books located in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. They are a delight to read. They are also testimony to Falkner’s thorough research for this book.
 
There's a sense of foreshadowing to the book: Susanna's mother “is still everywhere in the house, even as her body mouldered in the churchyard. At any moment she still might appear, coming out of the brew house, one of the barn kittens in her arms.”
 
Susanna can also still picture her family, dead husband and her father, her sister Judith. “There are shadows here, deep in the corners of the room, that even the waking sun can't dispel.”[ …] “She doesn't feel alone, here in the sleeping house. Every creak is a haunting. Every flicker of the flame is a ghost. “
 
Susanna thinks back to the memories of a seer, a peddler who used to bring ribbons and flowers, and who has the Sight: 

​The fumes of those approaching death…can congeal into the forms of their bodies. I myself have seen one lessen the burden of men carrying the coffin of his father by adding his shoulder to the rest. A man known to be dead five years past. And when the coffin was lowered into the ground, the man, congealed sprite, had vanished.

​I'm not going to tell you what this foreshadows.
 
I read Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (Tinder Press, 2020) and saw the film. There’s a tremendous appetite for the life and times of Shakespeare and his family, and the figure of Susanna Hall is no exception. There are numerous fictional portrayals of her. Here Falkner stays true to the facts but does what good historical fiction writers do: she extrapolates to make these facts come alive. She offers compelling characters. Susanna is struggling as a widow to the town’s physician. She helps residents of the town with their health issues, but she also has to deal with fabricated slander, maligning her reputation, and her grief over her brother Hamnet’s death. 
 
When in the midst of all this Queen Henrieta Maria arrives and seeks shelter, while Susanna is harbouring Robin, an ailing young man who has acted against the queen’s entourage as part of a group of resistance fighters, and is dying in her home, things become difficult and sometimes hilarious. I am not going to give anything away about the book mentioned in the title, but I did wonder about it and appreciate that Susanna on her epitaph was described as “witty above her sex.”
 
There is a nuanced connection here to me between the way in which young Robin is drawn into the fight: he wants adventure, he is beguiled by the romantic notion of fighting against the enemy. I think of young men today and how some of them are being radicalized to take up causes that may not be in their best interest to fight for.
 
Susanna Hall, Her Book is a compelling read with a ghostly tone and vivid recountings of history that is staying with me, long after I've finished reading it.

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Photo credit: Jim Johnstone

Amanda Earl (she/her) reads and reviews on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples. Earl is a resident reviewer for The Temz Review. Her most recent work is Slutflowers, a collaborative poetry chapbook with Matthew Walsh (Knife|Fork|Book, 2026). Earl is managing editor of Bywords.ca and the editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry (Timglaset Editions, 2021). Earl creates so that kindred misfits don’t feel alone. Subscribe to her Substack: Amanda Thru the Looking Glass here. Earl loves e-mails that are not AI or spam: [email protected].