Jill

A bored young gentlewoman walks out of her father's house and hires herself out as a lady's maid in Jill, E.A. Dillwyn's 1884 novel.

Gilbertina Trecastle, Jill to everyone, is not built for a quiet life. Her mother dies when she is twelve, and her father, an easygoing baronet who cannot stand to be bored, takes her on years of wandering through the hotels of Europe. Then he marries a pushy widow with two daughters, and Castle Manor comes under new management. Jill is fifteen when that happens, sharp-tongued and kept on a tight rein. She stands it as long as she can, then slips away from a railway station with a bag in her hand and no forwarding address.

In London she takes a false name, writes her own references, and learns the trade of a lady's maid from the inside. The post that changes things is with Kitty Mervyn, a distant cousin she met once on a wet Sunday in Lugano and has never quite put out of her mind. As Kitty's maid she sees Paris, the roads of Corsica, and at last the original of a photograph she found years earlier in a purse of Kitty's: a certain Captain Norroy. She also keeps up a private war with her stepmother by anonymous letter. A lost place, an accident, a long spell in a hospital ward, and a newspaper advertisement do the rest.

Jill tells her own story in a dry, unsentimental voice. This is Victorian adventure fiction with a New Woman at the wheel, part travelogue, part comedy of class, and a quiet portrait of one woman's attachment to another. Readers of Wilkie Collins, or of Anne Brontë's plainer heroines, will recognize the brisk intelligence here.

Twenty-four parts of hotel corridors, Corsican roads, and back-stairs gossip, read by Elizabeth Grace at a pace that suits a narrator this dry, make an easy country to doze in.