Life Mask: A Historical Exploration

London in the late 1780s is a city of theatres, salons, scandal sheets and gossip. Revolution is brewing across the Channel, and in the drawing rooms of the elite, a reputation can be made or destroyed in a single paragraph of a newspaper.

This is the world of Emma Donoghue’s Life Mask, a historical novel built around three real people: the celebrated comic actress Eliza Farren, the sculptor Anne Damer, and Edward Smith-Stanley, the 12th Earl of Derby.

Three lives, one scandal

Lord Derby, a leading Whig, is in love with Eliza Farren, but he is still married, and their relationship has to stay chaste and public. Eliza, who rose from poverty to the London stage, needs respectability to survive in high society. When she forms a close friendship with Anne Damer, a widowed artist known for her sculpture and her independence, rumours begin to circulate about the nature of Anne’s attachments to women.

As the gossip grows, Eliza has to choose between the friendship that sustains her and the reputation her future depends on. Donoghue uses that dilemma to explore how women’s lives were watched, judged and shaped by public opinion, and how love that had no name could still be powerful.

Rich historical detail

Life Mask is known for its research and scope. Figures such as Horace Walpole, Anne Damer’s close friend and correspondent, appear alongside the actors, politicians and hostesses of the period. Against the background of the French Revolution and British political turmoil, Donoghue builds a detailed picture of a society obsessed with appearances.

About the author

Emma Donoghue was born in Dublin in 1969 and lives in London, Ontario. She earned a PhD in eighteenth-century English literature from the University of Cambridge, and that background feeds her historical fiction, which often brings forgotten or marginalised lives back into view.

She is best known for Room (2010), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and adapted into an Oscar-winning film from her own screenplay. Her other novels include Slammerkin, The Wonder, The Pull of the Stars, Haven and Learned by Heart, a novel about Anne Lister’s school days that echoes some of the concerns of Life Mask.

For readers who love immersive historical fiction, layered characters and stories about the lives history tried to hide, Life Mask is still one of Donoghue’s most ambitious books.