Maggie O’Farrell is one of my favorite contemporary writers. She has a great talent for historical fiction (read Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait), and she excels at telling stories of women who find themselves in untenable positions. In The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Esme is a woman who, like Agnes in Hamnet and Lucrezia in The Marriage Portrait, is unusual in ways that make her seem dangerous to those around her. She does not conform to conventional traditional female roles and, as we know […]