Year of Wonders (2001) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Summary edit see section history

Characters/People edit see section history

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• Anna Frith: Housemaid to the rector and heroine of the story. She becomes a healer and midwife through necessity.
• Michael Mompellion: Pastor and leader of the village.
• Elinor Mompellion: Michael's wife and later Anna's friend
• Anys Gowdie: Herbalist
• Kate Talbot: Kate Talbot was the smith's pregnant wife
• Aphra: Anna's stepmother, a plain woman who holds to beliefs predating Christianity. Her heart has been hardened through loss, hardship, and grief.
• George Viccars: Tailor that comes to town. Rents a room from Anna.
• James Mallion: Anna's oldest son
• Sam Frith: Anna's husband, a miner. He is killed before the story begins.
• Tom Mowbray: Anna's youngest son
• Maggie Cantwell: Cook for the Bradford family
• Mr. Stanley: Former pastor who refused to switch to The Book of Common Prayer but still lives nearby.
• Anteros: Michael's horse
• John Gordon: assaulted Anys, took up the custom of flagellation
• Jane Martin: Anna's babysitter, a devout girl whose family is taken by the plague.
• Elizabeth Bradford: Daughter of Colonel Bradford. A selfish, self-important girl/woman who is proud and conniving.
• Hancock: A farming family near Anna's village.
• Mem Gowdie: Aunt of Anys, an woman wise about herbs and medicinals. Thought of by many as a witch.
• Alun Houghton: Barmester to the miners
• Seth Merrill: Jakob Merrill's young son
• Josiah Bont: Anna's father also called "Joss", a heavy-handed, quick-tempered, drunk who was mistreated early in life and has become cruel
• Christopher Unwin: Man who recuperated from the plague
• Edward Cooper: young boy who dies of the plague
• Lottie Mowbray: simple minded woman who tried to save her baby by hurting him
• Daniel: husband of the woman whose child Anna and Elinor delivered
• Lib Hancock: Friend of Anna's
• Mrs. Bradford: Rich woman who lives in the biggest house in Anna's village
• Randoll Daniel: Husband of Mary Daniels whose child Anna and Elinor delivered
• George Wickford: Merry's father who claimed a mine
• Brad Hamilton: man who tried to kill Mems
• Jon Millstone: Sexton who carried off bodies for burial
• Margaret Livesedge: Bought charms to save her baby from the plague
• Urith Gordon: wife of John Gordon who was abused by her husband
• Sally Maston: neighbor's five year old daughter who died of the plague
• Jane Hawksworth: villager who had the plague
• Alexander Hadfield: the taylor in Anna's village
• Jude: Jude Hamilton, son of Brad Hamilton, who was involved with lynching the witches
• Margaret Blackwell: the cooper's old wife, who lasted longer than anyone else with the plague
• Robert Snee: Person who talked about the plague in London
• Henry Bradford: son of the wealthiest family in the area
• Jakob Merrill: Widower who lived near the Boundary Stone and tried to help Maggie
• Maryam: Add a description of this character.
• Rector Mompellion: Anna's minister; Elinor's husband who has more to him then meets the eye.
• Andrew Merrick: the malter who tried to save himself by going off to live alone
• Mary Daniel: gave birth to a child which was delivered by Anna and Elinor
• Mr. Holbroke: rector of a nearby town who would yell across the terrain to talk with Mompellion
• Richard Talbot: Kate's husband, the smith, who died of the plague
• Merry: 9 year old girl whom Elinor and Anna helped save her family mine
• William Mompesson
• Martin Miller: a mason who fixed the place for the delivery of the supplies
• Maudie
• Brand Rigney: pantry boy for the Bradford's; becomes responsible for Jakob's children
• Mrs. Hancock: Matriarch of the Hancock family who farmed

Quotes edit see section history

• “Sometimes, not often, the orchard can bring back better times to me. These memories of happiness are fleeting things, reflections in a stream, glimpsed all broken for a second and then swept away in the current of grief that is our life now. I can't say that i ever feel what it felt like then, when I was happy. But sometimes something will touch the place where that feeling was, a touch as slight and swift as the brush of a moth's wing in the dark.”

  Anna

• “It was as if there were two of me, walking down those stairs. One of them was the timid girl who had worked for the Bradfords in a state of dread, fearing their hard looks and harsh words. the other was Anna Frith, a woman who had faced more terrors than many warriors. Elizabeth Bradford was a coward. She was the daughter of cowards. As I entered the parlor and faced her thunderous countenance, I knew I had nothing more to fear from her.”

  Anna

• “God warns us not to love any earthly thing above Himself, and yet He sets in a mother's heart such a fierce passion for her babes that I do not comprehend how he can test us so.”

  Anna

• “...for as I loved to learn, so she (elinor) loved to teach.”

  anna

• “I knew how easy it is for widow to be turned witch in the common mind, and the first cause generally is that she meddles somehow in medicinals.”

  anna

• “Mr. Stanley believed that sickness was sent by God to test and chastise thoe souls He would save. If we sought to evade such, we would miss the lessons God willed us to learn, at the cost of worse torments after our death.”

  anna

• “Despite the comon opinion of her in the village, I had always had admiration for Anys...I liked her because it takes a kind of courage to care so little for what people whisper, especially in a place as small as this.”

• “Why would I marry? I'm not made to be any man's chattel. I hav my work, which I love. i have my home--it is not much, I grant, yet sufficient for mty shelter. But more than these, I have something very few women can claim: my freedom. I will not lightly surrender it.”

  Anys

• “she was a rare creature, anys gowdie, and i had to own that i admired her for listening to her own heart rather than having her life ruled by others' conventions.”

  anna

• “dark and light, dark and light, dark and light. that was how i had been taught to view the world. the puritans who had ministered to us here had held that all actions and thoughts could be only one of two natures: godly and right, or Satanic and evil. but anys gowdie confounded such thinking.”

  anna

• “i disliked all of the bradford family, and i especially feared the colonel. and i misliked myself for giving way to that fear.”

  anna

• “my tom died as babies do, gently and without complaint. because they have been such a little time with us, they seem to hold to life but weakly. i used to wonder if it was so because the memory of heaven still lived within them, so that in leaving here they do not fear death as we do, who no longer know with certainty where it is our spirits go.”

  anna

• “mrs. mompellion had told me once that the cross came from a time when the christian faith was new to britain and had to vie with the old ways of the standing stones and bloody sacrifices. i wondered fully if the craftsman who made it was thinking to outdo those other, older stone monuments. had he fashioned it out of a faith that was hard and certain? or had it been the gesture of a man seeking to appease a god who seemed to want not the love and awe that the scriptures asked of us, but an endless surfeit of our suffering. 'According to Thy word.' Why were God's words always so harsh?”

  anna

• “Yet god in his infinite and unknowable wisdom has singled us out, alone amongst all the villages in our shire, to receive this Plague. it is a trial for us, i am sure of it. because of his great love for us, he is giving us here an opportunity that he offers to very few upon this earth. here, we poor souls of this village may emulate Our blessed Lord. who amongst us would not seize such a chance? dear friends, i believe we must accept this gift. it is a casket of gold! let us plunge in our hands to the elbows and carry away these riches!”

  Michael Mompellion

• “dear friends, here we are, and here we must stay. let the boundaries of this village become our whole world. let none enter and none leave while this plague lasts.”

  michael mompellion

• “and so, as generally happens, thoe who have most give least, and those with less somehow make shrift to share.”

  anna

• “the poppies of lethe: 'It is natural to want to forget, anna, when every day is a brimful of sadness. but those souls also forgot those that they had loved.'”

  Elinor Mompellion

• “The Press of Their Ghosts: 'Perhaps the plague was neither of god nor the devil, but simply and thing in nature, as the stone on which we stub a toe.'”

  anna

• “"Fear took each of us differently"”

  anna

• “It seems that dangerous ideas may spread on the very wind and seek us out near or far, as easily as the seeds of desease have done.”

  Michael Mompellion

• “"Because of her, I had known the warmth of a mothery concern--the concern that my own mother had not lived to show me. Because of her, I had had a teacher and was not ignorant and unlettered still...In my own heart, I could whisper it: she was my friend, and I loved her."”

  anna speaking of elinor

• “I wonder if you know how you have changed. it is the one good, perhaps, to come out of this terrible year. oh, the spark was clear in you when first you came to me--but you covered yourlight as if you were afraid of what would happen if anybody saw it. you were like a flame blown by the wind until it is almost extinguished. all i had to do was put the glass around you. and now, how you shine!”

  elinor speaking of anna

• “"We had been stripped bare indeed....all these humble things, waiting mute for the torch, spoke to me of the other losses that could not be piled up and regarded: the daily gestures of tenderness between man and wife; the peace in a mother's heart at the sight of her sleeping babe; the unique and private memories of all the many dead.”

  anna speaking of the burning of possessions

• “we were all of us like wounded animals, our hurts so raw and our fear so great that we would lash out at anyone..”

  anna

• “for life is not nothing, even to the grieving. surely humankind has been fashioned so, otherwise how would we go on?”

  anna

• “here we are alive, i said, and you and i will have to make of it what we can....let's go then, i whispered, let's go and live, since we have not choice in it.”

  anna to Michael Mompellion

• “i was alive, and i was young, and i would go on until i found some reason for it...i understood that where michael mompellion had been broken by our shared ordeal, in equal measure i had been tempered and made strong.”

  anna

• “and now it seems that there is no god, and i was wrong. in what i asked of elinor. in what i asked of myself...and wrong, most shockingly wrong, in what i asked of this village.”

  michael mompellion

• “in lying with him, i had sought to bring her closer to me. i had tried to become her in every way that i could. instead, in taking my pleasure from his body, i had stolen from her--stolen what should have been hers, her wedding night.”

  anna speaking of elinor

• “to have saved this small, singular one--this alone seemed reason enought that i lived. i knew then that this was how i was meant to go on: away from death and toward life, from birth to birth, from seed to blossom, living my life amongst wonders.”

  anna speaking of saving the bradfords' baby

• “i do not propose to go on as i have been, feeding on the gall of my own grief. for you grieve, and yet you live, and are useful, and bring life to others. one does not have to believe, after all, to bring comfort to those who yet do. i think you have saved more than two lives this day.”

  michael speaking to anna

• “..it seemed good to me to sever every tie that bound me to my old life. suddenly, and very clearly, i knew that i did not want to walk each day in yet another place where elinor had walked. for i was not elinor, after all, but anna. it was time to seek a place where the child and i together might make something entirely new.”

  anna

• “i am one of his (ahmed bey) wives now, in name if not in flesh...we have spoken much since then about faith: the adamantine one by which the doctor measures every moment of his day, and that flimsy, tattered thing that is the remnant of my own belief...i have told ahmed bey that i cannot say that i have faith anymore. hope, perhaps. we have agreed that it will do, for now.”

  anna

• “as is the way of their culture, they know me by the name of my firstborn, and so here i am anna frith no longer, but Umm Jam-ee--mother of jaime. it pleases me to have my little boy remembered so. it took me a long time to name the bradfords' baby..when we came here, ahmed bey suggested aisha, which is his word for 'life'. later, i learned that the women in the market also use it as their word for bread. it is an apt name, for she sustained me.”

  anna

• “anna speaking of her daughter by michael: 'i birthed her here, in the harem. she has her father's eyes...aisha grabs one hand. elinor clasps the other, and together we plunge into the jostling swarm of our city.'”

  anna

• “There are no pockets in a shroud.”

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Bradford Hall: Home of the wealthy family
• London: Place from which people were fleeing because of the plague-
• Eyam
• Cambridge
• Boundary Stone: where medicines and supplies were left for the people in Anna's village
• Bakewell: nearby town from which officials came if needed

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Errata edit see section history

In the paperback edition (ISBN 0142001430), the chapter heading for "Rat-fall" on p.65 is missing, but can be found on the running title from pp. 66-79.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Geraldine Brooks (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Alex Awards (2002)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: PR9619.3 B7153 Y4
• Dewey: 823.914

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Sex and violence, and great suffering

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Genre Fiction › Historical
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary

Books That Cite This Book edit see section history