A House in Micklegate

Helike is married to a Roman centurion and lives in the military camp at York, far from her original home in the south of France. Aldith is a Saxon blacksmith’s daughter whose peaceful childhood is disrupted by the Viking attack on the city. Johanna is a widow mourning her only son, who died fighting for Richard the Third at the Battle of Bosworth, and Pat is a WAAF officer in the Second World War.

Nine women have lived and died in the same street, Micklegate, that runs from the city walls to the river. This book shows us their lives, their everyday activities that are not very different across the centuries and the dramatic events that change them forever.

Each woman has her own story, a thread that adds to the tapestry of being a woman, then and now.

Elizabeth Poynter worked in China, Germany and Japan before returning to lecture in English for Academic Purposes and Linguistics at a UK university. She has had a lifelong interest in history, and has previously published a history of human hygiene. She has also written fiction in other genres, before returning to historical fiction with this book. Her research focus is on gender and language, and she is a keen advocate of gender equality.

Customer Reviews

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Dawn Leggott

What a creative and imaginative idea to write a novel centring on the lives of nine different women living in one street in one city but over very different time periods (from the year 203 to 2010). It is quite remarkable the amount of research that the author must have done, and the knowledge and understanding that one must have, to be able to write a novel which covers nine very distinct periods of history, spanning nearly 2000 years. Throughout the book women are centre stage – their resourcefulness, their strength of character (despite, or maybe because of, the roles society assigns to them), their intelligence and common sense, and the way that women throughout the centuries have adapted to the cultural limitations and expectations of being a woman rather than a man. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. The author captures the depth of feeling and the emotions of the female characters she portrays, and the character development and stories at times made the book utterly unputdownable. The author explores each woman’s personality sensitively and clearly, enabling the reader to immerse ourselves into each woman’s life. I also found the snippets of reflections on individual people’s lives – one could almost call them ‘wisdoms’ – which are embedded along the way, fascinating. They helped to engage me as a reader, as I also reflected upon these wisdoms within my own life. I would recommend this novel to anyone who is interested in people – their daily lives, the good times and the challenges – and how women’s lives are influenced by the cultural, social, historical and/or religious context of the world around them.

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Dawn Leggott

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