Historical novels are a double treat --- where else can you learn
about the past while having a rattling good time in the present? It
helps that these days we are no longer wading through huge,
elaborate tomes replete with family trees and detailed maps
(actually, I have a soft spot even for those). Now, although the
books are often shorter, they are longer on accuracy and emotional
intensity.

This is also a genre that women --- as authors and as readers ---
have laid special claim to, finding courage and inspiration for our
own daring adventures in these stories of pioneers of all
sorts...sexual, artistic, scientific. Maybe we need a new
sub-category, the feminist historical novel: fiction with female
characters who flout convention and prefigure our (relatively) more
liberated times.

THE VANISHING POINT features two English sisters who seem
specifically designed to score points off the misogynistic
moralists of 300 years ago. May Powers is a veritable Paris Hilton,
going to bed with anybody in pants and finally married off to a
cousin in the colonies (Maryland, to be exact) to save the family's
reputation and finances. Hannah Powers is a shy, epileptic redhead
who has been trained by their physician father in the medical arts,
but cannot practice them because of her sex. Although the two women
are "types" (the sexual revolutionary/wild child; the intellectual
who struggles with the domestic arts), they are also juicy,
engaging characters who invite us to identify with their
struggles.

And struggle they do. Author Mary Sharratt reminds us that this
country wasn't literally "born on the Fourth of July"; its roots
reach back to the very first colonists. "Once upon a time Americans
were the British, lost" is one of the quotes she uses as her
epigraph: She is quite brilliant at evoking the bewilderment of
people raised in cities and towns who suddenly find themselves
hacking out a life in an untamed land, and the way their emotions
and personalities seem to evolve in relation to the environment.
Gabriel, May's husband who was born in Maryland, is the only
character who is really in his element; the others are displaced
persons, perplexed by the alternating bounty and harshness of
nature.

This is a suitable backdrop for a story that is very much in the
tradition of the gothic romance, heavy with atmosphere, mystery,
tension, and the occasional ghoulish touch. After May and Hannah's
father dies, Hannah follows her sister to Maryland, but on the
tobacco "plantation" --- more a rough compound than an aristocratic
spread --- she finds only Gabriel (he, too, is something of a type:
He hunts, he cooks, he cleans, he wears buckskins...). He claims
that May succumbed to a fever after their baby died, and the truth
of what happened to her emerges only slowly, through flashbacks.
Meanwhile, Gabriel and Hannah fall in love and have their own
child. Sharratt also gets in some commentary on the evils of racism
--- plus a soupcon of Afro-Caribbean magic --- via Adele, a former
slave from Martinique with supernatural "powers" who was May's
servant and friend.

All this is more than slightly reminiscent of JANE EYRE or REBECCA:
the first wife --- victim or villain? --- shadowing the happiness
of the second; the ambiguous character --- murderer or martyr? ---
of the husband. As in those riveting classics, the pleasure is in
the telling, not in the familiar plot, and for the most part THE
VANISHING POINT kept me happily and suspensefully engaged.

True, it takes itself a little too seriously as historical
scholarship. We find letters bristling with capitalized nouns and
old-fashioned spellings, detailed recipes, herbal lore, and lavish
descriptions of clothing. Sometimes these minutiae add richness and
authenticity to the narrative; sometimes they just slow it
down.

But when THE VANISHING POINT remembers that it's fiction, which is
most of the time, it is an intelligent and gripping book that takes
us to the New World of outcasts --- indentured servants, mail-order
brides, failed tobacco planters, slaves --- rather than the more
prosperous early Americans we know from conventional historical
accounts. Mary Sharratt has a passion for her story, and it
shows.