Book Club - Emily Maguire’s Rapture

Final Draft - Great Conversations

Emily Maguire is the author of seven novels and has been shortlisted for the Stella, the Miles Franklin and many more awards.

In Emily Maguire’s new novel Rapture, the life of a young woman in ninth century Europe is fraught at best.

Under her father’s roof Agnes is indulged in her reading and stands out for her intelligence and wit. But this is no life for a girl, let alone a woman and Agnes must soon face the prospect that she will be married off.

Rejecting this fate Agnes implores her father’s friend to hide her. Obscuring her sex, Agnes enters a Benedictine monastery where she must forever be on guard against discovery.

The story of Agnes is based on the history or perhaps legend of Pope Joan/Ioannes Anglicus, an officially unofficial female Pope. The story has long fascinated and perturbed the sorts of people who gatekeep these sorts of male spaces and you can see how the possibility of a learned woman who rose to the top of the Catholic Church might ruffle a few feathers.

In Maguire’s hands Agnes’ story moves between the worldly and the divine.

At an early age Agnes is gored by a hog. This brutal action both convinces her she is not fit for marriage and also foreshadows the brief but also visceral encounters she will have with men in her future.

Agnes must negotiate a life wholly embodied; she is never able to forget her sex despite it going unnoticed by the myriad men around her. This life of the flesh convinces her to try and transcend it through her studies where she excels at academics beyond her male monkish peers.

Her excellence is taken for granted, because I guess they couldn’t possibly imagine a woman might be this clever, and Agnes rises through the clergy. Her talents put her on a course for Rome where she is destined to be seen as a paragon of learning.

It is perhaps because of her efforts to efface her womanhood that Agnes comes to be desired by so many around her. The tension and enjoyment of Rapture comes in the characterisation of Agnes’ struggle and the inner torment she suffers as she tries to find the place she has always craved in the world.

Maguire is a tremendous writer of character and through Agnes’ story we see both a history of submission challenged and a paralleling with women’s experience of success and the quest to live a public life today.

Rapture is far from the narratives of Australian life that have occupied earlier novels like An Isolated Incident and Love Objects. What the reader can expect though is the same concern with power structures and who gets to tell the story that occupies all her novels.