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'the essex serpent' spreads its wings.

Annalisa Quinn

The Essex Serpent

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The best kind of nature writing celebrates not the placidly, distantly picturesque — mountaintops and sunsets — but the near, dank, and teeming. The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry's gloriously alive historical novel, squirms with bugs, moss and marsh.

Liberated by the death of her brutal husband, Cora Seaborne escapes London for little Colchester — with "a ruin and a river, and web-footed peasants, and mud." She abandons the corset, the elegant town house and Victorian society for fossil-hunting and dirt under her fingernails. "I've freed myself from the obligation to try to be beautiful," she says, "and I was never more happy."

"Had it always been here — this marvelous black earth in which she sank to her ankles, this coral-colored fungus frilling the branches at her feet?" Cora wonders.

Had birds always sung? Had the rain always this light touch, as if she might inhabit it? She supposed they had, and that it had never been very far from her door. She supposed there must have been other times when she'd laughed alone into the wet bark of a tree, or exclaimed to no one over the fineness of a fern unfolding, but she could not remember them.

Out on the salt marshes where Cora hunts for fossils live the Reverend William Ransome and his lovely sprite of a wife ("no bigger than a fairy and twice as pretty"). Their fierce friendship, and ensuing love triangle — though mercifully not a bitter or dramatic one — forms the backbone of the novel.

Near the coastal village of Aldwinter, where Cora eventually moves to be closer to the Ransomes, nature is not inertly beautiful, but dangerous and alive: A sheep is sucked into the mud, boats are taken by the water, earthquakes split houses, and the residents wake in the mornings "from dreams of wet black wings."

Those wings belong to the titular Essex Serpent, a water serpent terrorizing the village — or according to William Ransome, just rumor a born of the dead man who washed up on shore, the missing sheep, a lost child, the unseasonable darkness, and a strange waver in the line of the water. Though even he, in moments, thinks, "But was it too great a stretch to imagine the Intelligence that once had split the Red Sea taking the trouble to send a little admonition to the sinners of a briny Essex parish?"

It can't be an accident that Perry placed her story about collective panic in Essex. Not only was there really a mythical winged serpent that terrorized locals there in the 17th century, but it was the location of the notorious Essex witch trials. The self-styled Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, traveled through the county, cutting women to see if they bled — if not, they were witches. Perry is good at catching the special collective dread that enflames communities — the fear that something sinister is stirring, waiting just out of sight. That gives a special magnetism to a story that needed none.

The moments of greatest emotion happen outdoors, as if only the layered and living woods could contain them. "Look, we are in a cathedral," Will says, walking in the woods with Cora. The Essex Serpent made me think of a line from George Eliot, "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence," she wrote. "As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity."

At its very best moments, when it shows how love, death, and regeneration all go hand-in-hand, The Essex Serpent is so painfully lovely that it removes a bit of that padding, only just as much as we can bear.

The Essex Serpent

Sarah perry.

422 pages, Hardcover

First published May 27, 2016

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‘Sometimes I think I sold my soul, so that I could live as I must. Oh, I don’t mean without morals or conscience—I only mean with freedom to think the thoughts that come, to send them where I want them to go, not to let them run along tracks someone else set, leading only this way or that…’ Frowning, she ran her thumb along the serpent’s spine and said, ‘I’ve never said this before, not to anyone, though I’ve meant to: but yes I’ve sold my soul, though I’m afraid it didn’t fetch too high a price. I had a faith, the sort I think you might be born with, but I’ve seen what it does and I traded it in. It’s a sort of blindness, or a choice to be mad—to turn your back on everything new and wonderful—not to see that there’s no fewer miracles in the microscope than in the gospels!’ ‘You think—you really think—that it is one or the other: your faith or your reason?’

I wanted to portray a late nineteenth century which was in many respects ‘modern’, rather than a sort of Victoriana theme-park of pea-soupers and smelling-salts. By the 1890s you could travel by Tube and walk along an Embankment lit by electric lights, you could have a tooth pulled under anaesthesia, join a union, read the Times, buy frozen lamb shipped over from New Zealand, and so on. I suppose the obverse of saying 'they were rather like us' is to say 'and we are rather like them', and I do fear that we are regressing to a decidedly Victorian state when it comes to housing, and a tendency to think of those who live in poverty as in some way deserving it due to a lack of virtue rather than mere ill fortune.

It struck her that everything under that white sky was made of the same substance—not quite animal, but not merely earth; where branches had sheared from their trunks they left bright wounds, and she would not have been surprised to see severed stumps of oak and elm pulse as she passed. Laughing, she imagined herself a part of it, and leaning against a trunk in earshot of a chattering thrush held up her arm, and wondered if she might see vivid green lichen stippling the skin between her fingers.

William Ransome and Cora Seaborne, stripped of code and convention, even of speech, stood with her strong hand in his; children of the earth and lost in wonder.

It was Sarah Perry’s husband who told her, on a car journey through Essex, having spotted a sign to the village of Henham, about the legend of a serpent. Perry felt her scalp tighten, the better to grasp the idea and keep it safe inside her head – a feeling she has become used to when she thinks of something she knows will make a great book. “Immediately, I thought if that beast came back in the Victorian era, post-Darwin, when there was a trend for natural history and people were fossil-collecting, people would have a very different response from those in the 17th century, who had seen this beast.” - from The Guardian interview

What I absolutely didn’t want to do was to write a book about two people who madly fancy each other and at the end of the book they fall in love and they get married. That’s so tiresome and life is so much more rich and complex and complicated than that. I wanted to write about a relationship that is intimate and tender and exciting and even erotic but not a conventional ‘boy-meets-girl and they’re soulmates and they live happy ever after’ story. Perry aimed to write about as many different kinds of friendship love as I could find. Ones which blur the boundaries between romantic love and friendship, seeing sexual desire as something cathartic and benevolent, even when it’s not connected to any kind of romantic attachment. I still maintain that Cora and Will are basically friends but that their friendship is capacious and different and subject to change - as human relationships are.” - from the Waterstones interview

When the rain set in, she delved deeper between the trees, turning her face to the featureless sky. It was a uniform grey, without shifting of clouds or sudden blue breaks, and no sign at all of the sun: it was an unwritten sheet of paper, and against it the bare branches were black. It ought to have been dreary, but Cora saw only beauty—birches unfurled their strips of bark like lengths of white cloths, and under her feet wet leaves were slick. Everywhere bright moss had taken hold, in dense wads of green fur swaddling the trees at their foot, and fine pelts on broken branches that lay across the path.

’It was just the light,’ she said, ‘up to its old tricks. But how was my heart to know?’

I had faith, the sort I think you might be born with, but I’ve seen what it does and I traded it in. It’s a sort of blindness, or a choice to be mad – to turn your back on everything new and wonderful – not to see that there’s no fewer miracles in the microscope than in the gospels!

Essex has her bride’s gown on: there’s cow parsley frothing by the road and daisies on the common, and the hawthorn’s dressed in white; wheat and barley fatten in the fields, and bindweed decks the hedges.

"I have you all now ... I have you all here now, sweethearts: be with me now before I go."

Then it carried me in spate to the Essex shore, to all the marsh and shingle, and I tasted on my lips the salt air which is also like the flesh of oysters, and I felt my heart cleaving, as I felt it there in the dark wood on the green stair and as I feel it now: something severed, and something joined.

He drew in a breath and all the seasons were in it: spring greenness in the grass, and somewhere a dog-rose blooming; the secretive scene of fungus clinging to the oak, and underneath it all something sharper waiting in a promise of winter.

PS—As you see, I could not resist sending you a primrose, though I was too impatient to press it well, and it has stained the page. I never could learn to bide my time! S.

It was not precisely that newcomers were unwelcome, but one or two phrases (society women … masculine intelligence …) were calculated to trouble any diligent minister of the church. He could picture her as precisely as if her photograph had been included in the envelope: entering the lonely final stages of life bolstered by yards of taffeta and a half-baked enthusiasm for the new sciences. Her son was doubtless down from Oxford or Cambridge, and would bring with him some secret vice which would either thrill Colchester, or make him completely unsuited to civilised company. She probably lived on a diet of boiled potatoes and vinegar, hoping Byron’s diet might improve her silhouette, and would almost certainly have Anglo-Catholic tendencies, and deplore the absence of an ornate cross on the All Saints altar. In the space of five minutes he furnished her with an obnoxious lap-dog, a toadying companion with no flesh on her bones, and a squint.

And then – voices lowered just a little – what about the Blackwater: had she heard? What about the man that drowned on New Year’s Day, and the animals found dead and the things they’d seen in the night? What about Cracknell, who’d gone mad now and sat up all night by Leviathan watching for the beast? Was something there and was it coming? Mr Caffyn saw the turn the morning had taken, and tried his best to turn it back. He said, ‘Now girls, don’t trouble Mrs Seaborne with that nonsense,’ and scrubbed out the ammonite sketched on the blackboard behind.

What Martha later recalled most vividly of those last few fog-white days was this: William’s wife and Cora’s son, fit together like broken pieces soldered on the seam.

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The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry - book review: A thing of beauty inside and out

For only a second novel it’s a stunning achievement, one worthy of prize nominations galore, from the wellcome to the man booker, article bookmarked.

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Serpent’s Tail £14.99 (pp. 418)

Sarah Perry’s new novel The Essex Serpent is a thing of beauty inside and out. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned a book’s cover in a review before, but Peter Dyer’s William Morris-inspired design is stunning, a tantalizing taste of the equally sumptuous prose that lies within.

Set at the very end of the nineteenth century, the Essex marshes become Perry’s Dover Beach, the setting for a three-way clash between science, religion and superstition, three serpents entwined: the snake of Asclepius coiling round its staff, that from the Garden of Eden, and a mythical terrible beast, “a monstrous serpent with eyes like a sheep, come out of the Essex waters and up to the birch woods and commons,” claiming human and animal lives alike.

The Essex Estuary abounds with fearful rumours of the latter, but Cora Seabourne – a young widow and aspiring Mary Anning, recently arrived from London – is convinced it’s a previously undiscovered “living fossil.” Meanwhile, William Ransome, the local vicar – a man whose faith is one of “enlightenment and clarity,” not blood, brimstone and darkness – is unconvinced by either explanation.

When it comes to historical fiction, Perry’s achieved the near impossible; she’s created a novel and within it a world that seems to have sprung complete and fully formed directly from the period in question – a long lost fin-de-siècle Gothic classic – but her characters are as enticingly modern as they are of their period.

Cora is about as far from a stereotypical Victorian wife as one can imagine – unconcerned with looking pretty and in possession of exceptional (“masculine”) intelligence – William as questioning as he is devout, and the host of other characters with which they are surrounded are pushing for welfare reforms and medical advances.

Each of whom is beautifully rendered – their desires real and raw, and their pleasures and pains deeply felt. In terms of contemporary comparisons, I was reminded of Sarah Moss’s Victorian-set novels Bodies of Light and Signs for Lost Children : the two authors linked by period and a concern with medicine, but also a similar masterful but understated command of their subject.

Perry also showcases the most beguiling evocations of landscape. “Colchester. Colchester! What is there at Colchester? A ruin and a river, and web-footed peasants, and mud,” someone asks Cora. So much more, Perry goes on to prove! For only a second novel it’s a stunning achievement, one for which I predict prize nominations galore, from the Wellcome to the Man Booker.

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The essex serpent, by sarah perry, recommendations from our site.

Like The Signature of All Things, this stars another brilliant Victorian-era lady scientist – this time it’s amateur palaeontologist and wealthy widow Cora Seabourne, who has come to investigate reports of a sea monster in the waters off the Essex coast in the hope that it might transpire to be a living fossil. Also like The Signature of All Things and Eleanor Oliphant , there’s a starcrossed romance at the heart of this book. Strange and unsettling, this is a wonderful book full of fascinating detail, with a brilliant, headstrong woman at its heart.

From our article Books like Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

Other books by Sarah Perry

After me comes the flood by sarah perry, our most recommended books, middlemarch by george eliot, war and peace by leo tolstoy, on liberty by john stuart mill, nineteen eighty-four by george orwell, the confessions by augustine (translated by maria boulding), republic by plato.

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The Essex Serpent: A Novel Paperback – Large Print, June 6, 2017

NOW AN APPLE TV+ SERIES

A  Washington Post  Notable Work of Fiction * Winner of the British Book Awards Fiction Book of the Year and overall Book of the Year *A  Kirkus Reviews Best Book of The Year * Waterstones Book of the Year * Costa Book Award Finalist

“A novel of almost insolent ambition—lush and fantastical, a wild Eden behind a garden gate...it’s part ghost story and part natural history lesson, part romance and part feminist parable. I found it so transporting that 48 hours after completing it, I was still resentful to be back home.”  —New York Times

London, 1893. When Cora Seaborne’s brilliant, domineering husband dies, she steps into her new life as a widow with as much relief as sadness: her marriage was an unhappy one, and she never suited the role of society wife. Seeking refuge in fresh air and open space, she leaves the metropolis for coastal Essex, accompanied by her inquisitive and obsessive eleven-year-old son, Francis, and the boy’s nanny, Martha, her fiercely protective friend. 

Once there, they hear rumors that after nearly three hundred years, the mythical Essex Serpent, a fearsome creature that once roamed the marshes, has returned. When a young man is mysteriously killed on New Year’s Eve, the community’s dread transforms to terror. Cora, a keen amateur naturalist with no patience for religion or superstition, is immediately enthralled, certain that what locals think is a magical sea beast may be a previously undiscovered species. 

Eager to investigate, she is introduced to parish vicar William Ransome, who is equally suspicious of the rumors but for different reasons: a man of faith, he is convinced the alarming reports are caused by moral panic, a flight from the correct and righteous path. As Cora and William attempt to discover the truth about the Essex Serpent’s existence, these seeming opposites find themselves inexorably drawn together in an intense relationship that will change both of them in ways entirely unexpected. And as they search for answers, Cora’s London past follows her to the coast, with striking consequences. 

Told with exquisite grace and intelligence,  The Essex Serpent  masterfully explores questions of science and religion, skepticism and faith, but it is most of all a celebration of love, and the many different—and surprising—guises it can take.

• Print length 592 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harper Large Print
• Publication date June 6, 2017
• Dimensions 6 x 1.18 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 0062670387
• ISBN-13 978-0062670380
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

“A novel to relish: a work of great intelligence and charm, by a hugely talented author.” — Sarah Waters

“Richly enjoyable... Ms. Perry writes beautifully and sometimes agreeably sharply... The Essex Serpent is a wonderfully satisfying novel. Ford Madox Ford thought the glory of the novel was its ability to make the reader think and feel at the same time. This one does just that.” — Wall Street Journal

“Gloriously alive.” — NPR

“The most delightful heroine since Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice …Perry creates that delicate illusion of the best historical fiction: an authentic sense of the past—its manners, ideals and speech—that feels simultaneously distant and relevant to us…By the end, The Essex Serpent identifies a mystery far greater than some creature ‘from the illuminated margins of a manuscript’: friendship.” — Washington Post

“A novel of almost insolent ambition--lush and fantastical, a wild Eden behind a garden gate...it’s part ghost story and part natural history lesson, part romance and part feminist parable. I found it so transporting that 48 hours after completing it, I was still resentful to be back home.” — New York Times

“A fabulous summer read...If Middlemarch heroine Dorothea Brooke had heard of dinosaurs, she might have gone tromping through the salt marshes with Cora Seaborne.” — Christian Science Monitor

“The sumptuous twists and turns of Perry’s prose invite close reading, as deep and strange and full of narrative magic as the Blackwater itself. Stuffed with smarts and storytelling sorcery, this is a work of astonishing breadth and brilliance.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“The vivid, often frightening imagery… and the lush descriptions… create a magical background for the sensual love story between Sarah and Will. Book-discussion groups will have a field day with the imagery, the well-developed characters, and the concepts of innocence, evil, and guilt.” — Booklist (starred review)

“In Perry’s excellent second novel… a fatal illness, a knife-wielding maniac, and a fated union with the Essex Serpent will dictate the ultimate happiness of [the] characters. Like John Fowles’s  The French Lieutenant’s Woman... this is another period literary pastiche with a contemporary overlay.” — Publishers Weekly

“Compulsive...narrative and voice coil together until it is very difficult to stop reading.” — The Guardian

“Irresistible” — People (Book of the Week)

“Astonishing...Perry’s prose is rich, textured, and intricate...a thoughtful and elegant book about the human need for knowledge and love, and about the fears and desires we bury.” — Vox

“Triumphs on every level, whether in its rich, evocative prose or its authentic Victorian detail, its credible, multifaceted characters or its high-stakes drama...Perry likened writing her novel to a ‘possession.’ Reading it, we find ourselves under a similar mesmerizing spell.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune

“ The Essex Serpent  is Sarah Perry’s first book to come across the pond to us from Great Britain, and it is a corker...Even the most minor characters are filled with a particular life, light and love...one of the best, most memorable novels I have read in long years.” — Daily Herald

“As engrossing as its reputation would suggest...Perry’s command of language as a tool to evoke time and place proves remarkable.” — Paste Magazine

 “Dickensian in scope, depth, and exquisite use of language … At once love story and mystery, deeply penetrating layered characters with wit and grace,  The Essex Serpen t reveals the mundane beast that spawned wild rumors, and the stranger, less easily unmasked beasts within us.” — Historical Novels Review

“Perry’s second novel is a dazzling and intellectually nimble work of Gothic fiction.” — San Francisco Gate

“At once numinous, intimate and wise, The Essex Serpent is a marvellous novel about the workings of life, love and belief, about science and religion, secrets, mysteries, and the complicated and unexpected shifts of the human heart…It is so good its pages seem lit from within.” — Helen Schulman, New York Times Book Review

“Everything they’re saying is true: sumptuous, beautiful, powerful, engrossing, brilliant.” — Nina Stibbe

“[T]he most deeply satisfying fiction you will read this year.” — Waterstones Book of the Year

“A blissful novel of unapologetic appetites, where desire and faith mingle on the marshes, but friendship is the miracle. Sarah Perry has the rare gift of committing the uncommittable to prose -- that is to say: here is a writer who understands life.” — Jessie Burton, author of The Miniaturist

“A big, warm, generous novel that wears its considerable wisdom lightly, The Essex Serpent is an absolute pleasure from start to finish—I truly didn’t want it to end.” — Melissa Harrison, author of At Hawthorn Time

“For originality, richness of prose and depth of characterization is unlikely to be bettered this year ... one of the most memorable historical novels of the past decade.” — Sunday Times

“Confident, intelligent and original storytelling -- I was seduced by the many charms of The Essex Serpent. ” — Laline Paull, author of The Bees

“Had Charles Dickens and Bram Stoker come together to write the great Victorian novel, I wonder if it would have surpassed The Essex Serpent ? Sarah Perry establishes herself as one of the finest fiction writers working in Britain today.” — John Burnside

“A suspenseful love story… The Essex Serpent recalls variously the earthiness of Emily Brontë, the arch, high-tensile tone of Conan Doyle, the evocation of time and place achieved by Hilary Mantel and Sarah Waters and the antiquarian edgelands horror of M. R. James.” — New Statesman

“Perry’s achieved the near impossible…A thing of beauty inside and out… a stunning achievement.” — The Independent

“Irresistible... you can feel the influences of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Hilary Mantel channeled by Perry in some sort of Victorian séance. This is the best new novel I’ve read in years.” — Daily Telegraph

“An exquisitely absorbing, old-fashioned page-turner… The Essex Serpent is shot through with such a vivid, lively sense of the period that it reads like Charles Dickens at his most accessible and fans of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell will also find much to love.” — Daily Express

“Perry fully inhabits many of the concerns and stylistic elements of the 19th century novel -- but its interests are still contemporary ones: desire, fulfillment and questioning the world… Her language is exquisite, her characterization finely tuned… [I]t’s clear that Perry is a gifted writer of immense ability.” — Irish Times

“A Victorian-era gothic with a Dickensian focus on societal ills, Perry’s second novel surprises in its wonderful freshness . . . [her] singular characters are drawn with a fondness that is both palpable and contagious, all making for pure pleasure.”  — The Observer

“Sarah Perry’s novel of 19th century England tackles big ideas...reversals and sharp darts of psychological insight combined with a sense of the substance and feeling of late 19th-century ideas in bloom make this a fine novel, both historical and otherwise.” — Newsday

From the Back Cover

London, 1893. When Cora Seaborne’s husband dies, she steps into her new life as a widow with as much relief as sadness: her marriage was an unhappy one. Seeking refuge in fresh air and open space, she leaves for coastal Essex, accomp-anied by her eleven-year-old son and his nanny. Once there, they hear rumors that after nearly three hundred years, the mythical Essex Serpent, a fearsome creature that once roamed the marshes, has returned. When a young man is mysteriously killed on New Year’s Eve, the community’s dread transforms to terror. Eager to investigate, Cora is introduced to parish vicar William Ransome. As they attempt to discover the truth, these seeming opposites find themselves inexorably drawn together in an intense relationship that will change them in ways entirely unexpected. 

About the Author

Sarah Perry is the internationally bestselling author of The Essex Serpent, Melmoth, and After Me Comes the Flood . She lives in England.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Large Print; Large type / Large print edition (June 6, 2017)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 592 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0062670387
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0062670380
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.36 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.18 x 9 inches
• #5,275 in Gothic Fiction
• #9,397 in Historical Fantasy (Books)
• #80,002 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Dear Author

Romance, Historical, Contemporary, Paranormal, Young Adult, Book reviews, industry news, and commentary from a reader's point of view

REVIEW: The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

Dear Ms. Perry,

Your novel first came to my attention when Robin, posting as Janet, reported that it won both Fiction Book of the Year and overall Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. I waited impatiently for it to be published in the United States and then checked it out of the library, since my success at finishing literary novels has been spotty in recent years.

The Essex Serpent caught my interest because it sounded like it had a lot of elements in common with what might be my favorite literary novel, Possession by A.S. Byatt. The reality was completely different from Possession , despite the presence of letter exchanges, romantic triangles, naturalism and a sea serpent, as well as a Victorian setting.

Set in late Victorian England over the better part of a year (1893), this is an observant novel, with a lot of interesting historical detail. The main characters are Cora Seaborne, a politician’s widow from London, and William Ransome, a married vicar from Aldwinter, a village in Essex.

Cora’s late husband, Michael, was abusive, and his death has freed her. She and her companion, Martha (a socialist feminist who loves Cora), as well as her young, neuroatypical son, Francis, come to Essex and are introduced to Will, his wife Stella, and their three children, by mutual friends.

Besides these, residing in London are the mutual friends, Charles, a middle-aged, complacent politician, and his wife Katherine, as well as Luke, the surgeon who operated on Cora’s husband and who is also in love with her, and his friend Spencer, who loves Martha.

Though Martha doesn’t reciprocate Spencer’s feelings, she is aware of them and uses them to encourage him to put some of his wealth and clout behind a humane solution to London’s urban housing crisis. Edward, one of Luke’s patients, whom Martha is interested in, is another London character the book follows.

In Essex, we encounter Thomas Taylor, a panhandler, and a few villagers—Bates, a fisherman, his daughter, Naomi, a friend to Will’s teenage daughter Joanna, Cracknell, who lives by the estuary, and others in the village of Aldwinter.

Most of the villagers fear that the Essex Serpent, a sea monster rumored for centuries to reside in the estuary, has returned and is responsible for a drowning and some other recent misfortunes. Will tries to steer his parishioners to be more rational, with little success; Cora, meanwhile, has a strong interest in naturalism and believes the serpent may be a living fossil (dinosaur) that she hopes to be credited with discovering.

Soon after Cora and Will meet, a friendship fraught with attraction develops between them. Stella, Will’s wife, is at first tolerant and later subtly uneasy with it, while Luke and Martha seethe with resentment.

Will and Cora’s romance is a quiet one, steeped in the details of their ordinary lives but also in their intellectual interests. You give a lot of attention to the setting, from the omnipresent mud to the blue flowers and trinkets that Stella collects, as well as to the scientific beliefs of the times, the London housing crisis, and to social interactions. The novel feels well-paced; it’s not rushed but nor does it drag.

The book has what I think of as the Midsummer’s Night’s Dream trope — most everyone is in love with someone who loves someone else — but unlike Shakespeare, you don’t play that for laughs. On the other hand, you don’t go as tragic with it as you could have either, and I was glad of it. The threat of tragedy is there, and it lingers over much of the book, but never quite envelops it. There are also occasional touches of humor, a nice sense of the absurd.

The main external conflict is between science and religion, reason and superstition. This is primarily reflected in Will’s struggle with his community, but Will and Cora’s internal conflicts parallels this conflict. Neither wants to feel the emotions they feel, but their feelings stubbornly stick around, driving them to make choices they don’t entirely understand and can’t reason away.

The strongest element in the book, for me, was the fervor in the villagers’ superstition, the infectious nature of their insistence that what they felt must supersede what rational logic or science might say. I was reminded of some of the issues our own society faces today.

Ultimately, The Essex Serpent wasn’t revelatory, but I did find it both interesting and quietly satisfying. B/B+.

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Janine Ballard loves well-paced, character-driven novels in romance, fantasy, YA, and the occasional outlier genre. Examples include novels by Ilona Andrews, Mary Balogh, Aster Glenn Gray, Helen Hoang, Piper Huguley, Lisa Kleypas, Jeannie Lin, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Naomi Novik, Nalini Singh, and Megan Whalen Turner. Janine also writes fiction. Her critique partners are Sherry Thomas and Meredith Duran. Her erotic short story, “Kiss of Life,” appears in the Berkley anthology AGONY/ECSTASY under the pen name Lily Daniels. You can email Janine at janineballard at gmail dot com or find her on Twitter @janine_ballard.

I’d seen many favorable mentions of this book but really had no idea as to the content. I feel far better informed now! Thanks for the review, Janine. I may add this to my list.

This sounds really interesting! I’m a little daunted by the number of characters one needs to keep straight, though…

@ Kareni : You’re welcome!

@ Jennie : FWIW, it wasn’t that hard to keep track of the characters, for me, because there was a lot of differentiation between them. It really helped that some were Londoners and others country people, some were upper middle class or wealthy while others were poor, and some were in between those extremes. And they had different beliefs, not just about the serpent but about society.

The characters were also not introduced all at once, and that helped too.

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THE ESSEX SERPENT

by Sarah Perry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 6, 2017

Stuffed with smarts and storytelling sorcery, this is a work of astonishing breadth and brilliance.

The unlikely friendship between a canny widow and a scholarly vicar sets the stage for this sweeping 19th-century saga of competing belief systems.

Widow Cora Seaborne knows she should mourn the death of her husband; instead, she finally feels free. Eschewing the advice of her friends, Cora retreats from London with her lady’s maid, Martha, and strange, prescient son, Francis. The curious party decamps to muddy Essex, where Cora dons an ugly men’s coat and goes tramping in the mud, looking for fossils. Soon she becomes captivated by the local rumor of a menacing presence that haunts the Blackwater estuary, a threat that locks children in their houses after dark and puts farmers on watch as the tide creeps in. Cora’s fascination with the fabled Essex Serpent leads her to the Rev. William Ransome, desperate to keep his flock from descending into outright hysteria. An unlikely pair, the two develop a fast intellectual friendship, curious to many but accepted by all, including Ransome’s ailing wife, Stella. Perry ( After Me Comes the Flood , 2015) pulls out all the stops in her richly detailed Victorian yarn, weaving myth and local flavor with 19th-century debates about theology and evolution, medical science and social justice for the poor. Each of Perry’s characters receives his or her due, from the smallest Essex urchin to the devastating Stella, who suffers from tuberculosis and obsesses over the color blue throughout her decline. There are Katherine and Charles Ambrose, a good-natured but shallow society couple; the ambitious and radical Dr. Luke Garrett and his wealthier but less-talented friend George Spencer, who longs for Martha; Martha herself, who rattles off Marx with the best of them and longs to win Cora’s affection; not to mention a host of sailors, superstitious tenant farmers, and bewitched schoolgirls. The sumptuous twists and turns of Perry’s prose invite close reading, as deep and strange and full of narrative magic as the Blackwater itself. Fans of Sarah Waters, A.S. Byatt, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things should prepare to fall under Perry’s spell and into her very capable hands.

Pub Date: June 6, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-06-266637-6

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Custom House/Morrow

Review Posted Online: March 5, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Sarah Perry

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BOOK TO SCREEN

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

LITERARY FICTION

More by Donna Tartt

by Donna Tartt

SEEN & HEARD

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

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‘The Essex Serpent’ Review: Claire Danes, the Disrupter

The “Homeland” star returns as another headstrong force of nature in a Victorian monster story from Apple TV+.

• Share full article

By Mike Hale

Claire Danes has come in from the cold. Two years after we left her snooping around Moscow in “Homeland,” she has re-emerged in Victorian England, pottering about the coast in “The Essex Serpent” on Apple TV+. Things are still pretty chilly for her, though.

Danes plays the wealthy widow Cora Seaborne in this six-episode mini-series, an adaptation of the award-winning novel by Sarah Perry , which premiered Friday. Cora has a lot in common with Carrie Mathison in “Homeland”: She’s headstrong, charming, a little narcissistic, coping with trauma and always the smartest person in the parlor.

The show begins with the disappearance of a young girl in the gloomy marshes of Essex, which is blamed on a mysterious sea creature, and the death of Cora’s husband in their London mansion after a long illness. There are hints that Cora suffered abuse at his hands, and his death liberates her; she can do what she wants, and she follows her passion for natural history to the fishing village where the creature was supposedly seen, thinking that it might be a plesiosaur , a dinosaur that has evaded evolution. Freed from one monster, she sets off in search of another.

There’s a lot going on inside “The Essex Serpent,” not all of it successful, though the mini-series is generally handsome, literate and quite well acted. The most pedestrian aspect is the social-change drama, in which Cora and her politically minded lady’s maid and best friend, Martha (Hayley Squires), try to empower women and help the poor. Better, though never as creepy or as evocative as you’d like, is the Gothic horror story, which sees the isolated and superstitious villagers grabbing their crucifixes and sharpening stakes as more disappearances are attributed to the serpent.

More successful still is the Victorian drama of ideas, in which Cora and a brilliant, buoyantly conceited young surgeon, Luke (an excellent Frank Dillane), stand in for Darwin and Freud, and God is represented by Will (Tom Hiddleston), a learned and rational local vicar who insists that the serpent is a product of the villagers’ imaginations but begins to have doubts.

And then there’s the associated love story, which is what you’ll take away from “The Essex Serpent,” not necessarily because it’s so sexy or interesting but because the actors involved are so hard to take your eyes off. The single Luke and the married Will (whose wife, played by Clémence Poésy, is unusually accommodating) are both besotted with Cora, while she, still scarred by her marriage, struggles to find a way to respond. The passions play out in the village and in posh London environs with entertaining displays of jealousy, tragic forbearance and smashed crockery.

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Other Media Review

Series review: the essex serpent.

by Carrie S · Jun 25, 2022 at 5:00 am · View all 13 comments

The Essex Serpent

by Anna Symon, based on the novel by Sarah Perry

The Essex Serpent is slow, pretty, slightly creepy, and sexy in that “I can’t have you so I’ll stare at you with my brooding, metaphorically piercing eyes instead of having sex” sort of way that some people despise and other people adore.

My idea of pure happiness on this earthly plane is Claire Danes digging fossils out of cliffs while wearing trousers and a floppy hat, accompanied by Tom Hiddleston in a sweater, so I was down with this for the most part. But if you aren’t, I get it, because this is terribly slow paced stuff, and worse, it lacks chemistry.

Our story begins with the death of a horrible man, the abusive husband of Cora Seaborne. Cora, played by Claire Danes, positively glows with bliss once her tormentor is dead. She gathers up her son and her companion, Martha, played by Hayley Squires, and makes for the Blackwater Estuary of Essex, a place of tidal mudflats and marshes and channels that lead to open sea. Cora is fascinated by recent rumors of the Essex Serpent.

She is also fascinated by the local vicar, (Tom Hiddleston, still my true love), who is married to the perfect wife and mother and friend Stella (Clémence Poésy). Meanwhile, Martha (who, to my delight, is a Marxist) is clearly in love with Cora, and so is London hotshot doctor Luke (Frank Dillane).

All this simmers on low burn while Cora delights in poking at cliffs for fossils and dancing at her birthday party in bare feet, but threat lurks in the increasing local panic about the serpent. Cora and Will try to get villagers to calm the fuck down, an effort the villagers do not appreciate because no one likes to be told to calm down, especially when the person who is telling you to calm down is literally standing over a corpse.

Should you watch this show? Here some of the pertinent FAQ’s:

Does everyone wear comfy sweaters and interesting historical clothing?

Do people gaze at each other, tense and sort of vibrating with silent and repressed longing?

Sure thing.

Does Tom Hiddleston get dressed up and waltz?

Of course, we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Does a weird guy with an unfortunate beard yell about sin a lot?

Alas, it is so.

Does someone yell, “SHE’S A WITCH?” at an out-of-towner redhead in a red dress?

Takes them long enough, but they get around to it eventually.

Is there a monster?

I won’t say whether the monster is real, but I will say that we see far too little of any creepy content, cryptid or otherwise.

I get that this show has interesting female characters, but are women also behind the camera?

Why yes! For instance, the series is based on a novel by Sarah Parry, directed by Clio Barnard, and written by women.

This series benefits from complex and interesting characters and excellent actors. No one is one-dimensional. Everyone has flaws but also strengths with the possible exception of the curate who spends all of his time yelling about sin.

The women are particularly mesmerizing – Cora with her mingled compassion and cluelessness, curiosity about the world, and joy in her independence, Martha’s crusading spirit, savvy political awareness, and quietly broken heart, and Stella with her clear-eyed view of her family’s future.

Stella says hello to Cora’s son, Frankie, who is hanging out under a table.

Alas, there are two problems with this show that utterly sink it: glacial pacing and a lack of chemistry between Danes and Hiddleston.

This entire endeavor depends on Cora and Will feeling an intense, irresistible, insatiable attraction towards one another but they both just look, respectively, nervous and (forgive me, Tom, you know I’ll always love you) constipated.

I buy their friendship but not the sexual chemistry and without the sexual chemistry there’s no reason for 90% of the drama. Will, in particular, is just a sad mop of a man, ineffectual in every way and making everything about him.

“Is this my judgment?” he asks, upon learning that Stella has tuberculosis.

Jesus, asshole, your wife’s TB is not about you! Get a hold of yourself, man!

I’ve had a stressful couple of months, y’all, so frankly I didn’t give a shit what happened in this series as long as beautiful people wore beautiful clothes amongst interesting scenery. But I’m essentially using this series as wallpaper. As a drama, there is not a lot here. Whole episodes pass with just a teensy bit of plot taking place about five minutes from the end.

Is the series creepy?

Is it sexy?

Alas, IMHO, no, not especially.

Do I care about these people?

Kinda, but mostly as individuals, not as potential romantic partners, which is a problem in a show so propelled by romantic entanglements.

The show has six episodes and no significant payoff. Many questions remain unanswered at the end of the show, and although the characters’ relationships with each other have finally fallen into place, they do so anticlimactically. I can only recommend this show to the most devoted fans of historical drama. It’s simply too slow paced and too lacking in chemistry to be compelling.

It’s a shame, because all of the characters are fascinating and they, as well as the actors that portray them, deserve so much better.

Add Your Comment →

I read The Essex Serpent, twice, because I entirely forgot having read it the first time. One time, I rated it four stars, highly enjoyable. The other time, I gave it two stars, which means I bothered to finish it but only because I hated it so much. I can’t really explain the discrepancy because… I have entirely forgotten it again. So I really can’t say if I recommend it. Made more hilarious to me because I almost only ever give three stars, and that’s just so I know that I read a book.

I read and adore chunky 19th century novels–Dickens, Gaskell, Collins, the Brontes–on the regular. Like at least 2 a year. And I found the book dull, plodding, and unreadable. No compelling characters or romance, no suspense. It felt like the sort of worthy book people think they should be reading versus actually a well-written book.

I am slightly more favorable to this series, and would put it at a B-. I really applaud the complex characterization and acting of the three female leads. And while I agree with Carrie that most of it was fraught with tension but not particularly sexy, episode 4 notched the repressed sexual desire up to 11 and was fabulous tv. It’s really a shame the rest of the series didn’t feel the same. The monster mystery was a pretty thinly veiled metaphor (maybe? Still not really sure what we were getting at there). I have had the book on my kindle for years but haven’t read it. I expected the plot to be more supernatural based on descriptions, which it is not in the series.

Overall though, I thought the series was beautiful and atmospheric viewing and what I needed in my evenings during a rough week. if you enjoy period costuming I highly recommend checking out at least a few episodes just to ogle Cora’s knit sweater coats and Stella’s art deco-inspired blue gowns.

I tried to watch this, I really did. But I just couldn’t. I lasted two episodes before I gave up — the pacing was just so SLOOOOOOOOOOW.

I love Tom Hiddleston and Claire Danes but not in TES. I barely made it through episode 1 and then decided life is too short. I’m watching series 3 of Derry Girls.

My feeling when I finished the book, was: humph, that’s it? If the series is even slower, I can’t imagine watching it.

This review exactly sums up how I felt about the book. I was nothing short of astonished that it sold so well and got awards.

What I remember most about reading the book was getting at least two or three chapters in and not actually realizing it was set in the nineteenth century. The description of the world and characters (at first, anyway) just lacked the specificity and detail that would have helped make that clear. And for the rest of it, I echo Mabry’s “that’s it?” No thoughts about the series, but it’s a pity that the adaptation process doesn’t seem to have improved on the source material.

I had not even realized that The Essex Serpent was adapted into a TV series! Sad that they cast big names like Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston, and the two don’t have any chemistry together. I think I’ll try reading the book first before deciding if I want to watch the show.

Not that I imagine it would ever have happened, but a repeat casting of Damian Lewis and Claire Danes (so excellent together in HOMELAND) would have brought lots more sizzle, whereas a Gothic repairing of Jessica Chastain with Tom Hiddleston for ESSEX SERPENT would probably still lack the needed spark. There didn’t seem to be enough passion behind the opposing viewpoints held by Will and Cora in the television adaptation, and I never felt entirely convinced that Will had a religious calling (more screen time was given to surgical operations in London than to church sermons in Essex).

Never heard of this, perked up when I saw Tom Hiddleston, but if something is called The Essex Serpent there had better be a helluva lot of SERPENT (actual and metaphorical) in it, if you know what I mean.

I mean, adaptations have so many ways to fail one must sometimes simply tip the hat and say ‘thank you for trying’ but – SERPENT!! In the title! In a series with TH, irresistibly sexy as chaotic evil Loki! Make it a shapeshifter story, people! One where the sexy conflicted vicar IS THE SERPENT!!

Sorry, that got away from me a little. For all I know, that’s the Big Reveal right there. 🙂

An important ingredient that I observed in The Essex Serpent was the emphasis on science and technology and the new era of thought compared with the superstitious, almost old testament religion touched with a little pagan-like reverance for the mythical ‘Essex Serpent’ held by the town folk from the country side marshland. The serpent head is not only in the minds of the locals but carved into the chapel pews. It appears to have a history in the village. The superstitious beliefs of the people of the Marshland are in contrast with the changing belief systems and independence brought to the village from London via the fast train service with its underground and through the young Doctor’s interest pushing the boundaries of medicine. While the Clare Danes character is also trying to push a rational scientific answer to the serpents origins using theories about non extinct dinosaurs. Underpinning this battle is the 19th C. romantic tension always suggested and proper juxtaposed with the more free thinking emancipated female characters and references to social change.

Is Miss Scarlett and the Duke on PBS a better option? I would say yes. Good chemistry actually mystery and delightful side characters. Also a nemesis has appeared so lots of emotional damage to work through.

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The Essex Serpent

Adapted from the novel by Sarah Perry , “The Essex Serpent” concerns the emergence of a monster that may not even exist. There are gruesome clues of its existence: a young girl’s corpse is found chewed up; a long fence of nets, meant to capture it, is destroyed. A bonafide underwater troll no one can comprehend, the mythological serpent causes a small town’s collective mental stability to go MIA.  

But “The Essex Serpent,” a compelling and surprising six-episode adaptation now playing on Apple TV+, uses this mystery only for surface appeal. With nuanced performances from the likes of Claire Danes , Tom Hiddleston , Clémence Poésy , and Frank Dillane , the story finds deeper purpose in ruminating on other entities that easily scare people when they do not understand them: science; socialism; progress.

Heaven forbid that many of those ideas be embodied by a woman right on the cusp of the 20th century. That person is Cora Seaborne (Claire Danes), an archaeologist who ventures to the small village of Aldwinter in Essex to investigate the creature and search for fossils. She reasons that the creature does exist and that it could have “escaped evolution,” creating its own path. The faithful of Essex are like the flip side of the groupthink that makes up Pawnee in “Parks and Recreation,” and think the serpent is payback for their sins. Town pastor Will Ransome (Tom Hiddleston) is skeptical about the serpent being real and tries to temper the growing hysteria in his parishioners’ fire and brimstone thinking. Cora makes them even more fearful, all the more so given her timing with the monster’s arrival.  

Every episode of the series is directed by Clio Barnard , who has a great approach to telling a mystery pitched in the unknown of belief. She blankets the episodes with a disquieting tone, mixing ominous wide shots of Aldwinter’s spread-out small town with jarring handheld close-ups, a potent mix of classic and new filmmaking approaches to a period piece like this. Threatening clouds always hang overhead, while strings from Dustin O’Halloran and Herdís Stefánsdottir growl lower and lower—the series gets a lot of mileage from such rich gloominess. The moments back in Cora’s ornate realm of London prove to have less of an allure, even if the dresses, three-piece suits, and location suggest a strong eye for detail.  

There are no flat main characters in this ensemble, who help make this series far more interesting and expansive than if it were just about its sea creature mystery. Cora begins a close friendship with a workaholic heart surgery doctor named Luke Garrett, played by Frank Dillane with an impressive balance of haughtiness and vulnerability, especially as he starts to crush on Cora. He is shown creating medical history, and being ignorant of Cora’s mental health, thinking he can describe it away with something he read in a book. 

There are also extended scenes that follow the aspirations of her servant, friend, and housing advocate Martha ( Hayley Squires ), who is such a socialist that the show seems to mention the detail every time she’s on-screen. Hiddleston’s vicar too, though the most underdeveloped main figure of the bunch, has his own complicated feelings about Cora, in part because of his faith, and the love for his wife Stella (Clémence Poésy). And yet even she has a striking approach to their budding attraction, showing the nuance that comes in not looking at things in black and white.  These stories are not directly related to the serpent, but the strength of the performances proves they do not have to be. 

At the center of all this is Cora. Through Danes’ performance, the series gains a rich, empathetic view of someone who seems to cause destruction everywhere they go, even if it’s not their intent. Danes illustrates the confusion and hurt in the process of her facing the multiple people who are attracted to her, the shame from Aldwinter townspeople, and her own trauma from the previously abusive relationship that she has escaped by becoming a widower, but carries with a scar on her neck. Episodes four and five practically forget about the serpent in Essex and make clear that however heavy-handed the metaphor may be, Cora’s energy is a significant serpent in everyone else’s lives.  

A minor scandal brews throughout “The Essex Serpent” regarding new widow Cora and hot vicar Will; though the tension will surely help sell the series, it’s the most shorthanded component in the story. Their mental duels, of his religious skepticism going against her science, prove to be more interesting than the looming threat of them becoming entangled. But at least Danes and Hiddleston have strong chemistry for these moments where they act like the only people on the marsh: their wistful gazes, the way they kiss with their mouths open as if it were their first kiss; the way he puts his scarf around her neck, dark green as this gloomy tale’s stand-in for the warmth of red. 

One could accuse “The Essex Serpent” of being too slack with its central mystery, even as it uses the serpent for a few too many freakout dream sequences that are scattered about the show. But that overlooks how much it uses its powers for a far more interesting cause. With pacing that’s best described as assured—in the allure of its writing, cinematography, performances, etc.—“The Essex Serpent” takes a bolder chance in letting its characters stew. “The Essex Serpent” successfully creates a full world beyond its marsh, oftentimes treating the monster as a revealing conversation topic. 

Full series screened for review. The first two episodes of “The Essex Serpent” are now playing on Apple TV+, with a new episode each week. 

Nick Allen is the former Senior Editor at RogerEbert.com and a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

• Claire Danes as Cora
• Tom Hiddleston as Will
• Frank Dillane as Luke
• Clémence Poésy as Stella
• Hayley Squires as Martha
• Clio Barnard

Writer (novel)

• Sarah Perry

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Book summary and reviews of The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

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The Essex Serpent

by Sarah Perry

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Book summary.

Costa Book Award Finalist and the Waterstones (UK) Book of the Year 2016 An exquisitely talented young British author makes her American debut with this rapturously acclaimed historical novel, set in late nineteenth-century England, about an intellectually minded young widow, a pious vicar, and a rumored mythical serpent that explores questions about science and religion, skepticism, and faith, independence and love.

When Cora Seaborne's brilliant, domineering husband dies, she steps into her new life as a widow with as much relief as sadness: her marriage was not a happy one. Wed at nineteen, this woman of exceptional intelligence and curiosity was ill-suited for the role of society wife. Seeking refuge in fresh air and open space in the wake of the funeral, Cora leaves London for a visit to coastal Essex, accompanied by her inquisitive and obsessive eleven-year old son, Francis, and the boy's nanny, Martha, her fiercely protective friend. While admiring the sites, Cora learns of an intriguing rumor that has arisen further up the estuary, of a fearsome creature said to roam the marshes claiming human lives. After nearly 300 years, the mythical Essex Serpent is said to have returned, taking the life of a young man on New Year's Eve. A keen amateur naturalist with no patience for religion or superstition, Cora is immediately enthralled, and certain that what the local people think is a magical sea beast may be a previously undiscovered species. Eager to investigate, she is introduced to local vicar William Ransome. Will, too, is suspicious of the rumors. But unlike Cora, this man of faith is convinced the rumors are caused by moral panic, a flight from true belief. These seeming opposites who agree on nothing soon find themselves inexorably drawn together and torn apart - an intense relationship that will change both of their lives in ways entirely unexpected. Hailed by Sarah Waters as "a work of great intelligence and charm, by a hugely talented author," The Essex Serpent is "irresistible ... you can feel the influences of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and Hilary Mantel channeled by Perry in some sort of Victorian séance. This is the best new novel I've read in years" ( Daily Telegraph , London).

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"Starred Review. Book-discussion groups will have a field day with the imagery, the well-developed characters, and the concepts of innocence, evil, and guilt. Like Lauren Groff's The Monsters of Templeton (2008), the appearance of a sea monster sheds more light on humanity than on natural history, while the sudden revelation of a creature of the deep heralds change and revelation, as in Jim Lynch's The Highest Tide (2005)." - Booklist "Starred Review. The sumptuous twists and turns of Perry's prose invite close reading, as deep and strange and full of narrative magic as the Blackwater itself. Fans of Sarah Waters, A.S. Byatt, and Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things should prepare to fall under Perry's spell and into her very capable hands. Stuffed with smarts and storytelling sorcery, this is a work of astonishing breadth and brilliance." - Kirkus "Like John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman , whose Lyme Regis setting gets a shout-out here, this is another period literary pastiche with a contemporary overlay. Cora makes for a fiercely independent heroine around whom all the other characters orbit." - Publishers Weekly "I loved this book. At once numinous, intimate and wise, The Essex Serpent is a marvelous novel about the workings of life, love and belief, about science and religion, secrets, mysteries, and the complicated and unexpected shifts of the human heart - and it contains some of the most beautiful evocations of place and landscape I've ever read. It is so good its pages seem lit from within. As soon as I'd finished it I started reading it again." - Helen MacDonald, author of H is for Hawk

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Sarah Perry Author Biography

Sarah Perry is the internationally bestselling author of The Essex Serpent , Melmoth , and After Me Comes the Flood . She lives in England.

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Apple TV Plus’ The Essex Serpent is a slow, tense drama with lots of great sweaters

Come for the outfits, stay for the chaos.

By Andrew Webster , an entertainment editor covering streaming, virtual worlds, and every single Pokémon video game. Andrew joined The Verge in 2012, writing over 4,000 stories.

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How much you enjoy The Essex Serpent , an Apple TV Plus adaptation of Sarah Perry’s 2016 novel, might depend on how much you enjoy seeing Tom Hiddleston brooding in a misty field while wearing cozy wool sweaters. For a lot of people, that will probably be enough of a hook. (It was for me.) But thankfully, the six-episode series offers a lot more than great hair blowing in the wind — it’s a tense and heartfelt exploration of grief and belief and how much those two things can mess with you. The great sweaters are just a bonus.

The show primarily follows two characters. One is Cora Seaborne (Claire Danes), a recent widow and a budding natural history scholar who has quite the fixation with sea serpents. She spends her spare time researching them via old books, maps, and newspaper clippings. When rumors pop up that a serpent has been terrorizing a small fishing village in Essex, she — along with her young son (Caspar Griffiths) and friend / housekeeper (Hayley Squires) — boards a train from London to investigate.

What she finds when she arrives isn’t a serpent — at least not initially, no spoilers there — but rather a town steadily going mad with fear. A missing child has everyone on edge, blaming the mythical creature, which, many believe, is attacking the most sinful of the bunch. As bad things continue to happen to pretty much everyone, the tragedies are inevitably blamed on the beast. One of the first people Cora meets in town is Will Ransome (Hiddleston), a local pastor and one of the few people who doesn’t think the serpent is a bad omen from God.

Initially, The Essex Serpent leans pretty heavily on some well-worn tropes. When Cora and Will first meet, they have no idea who each other is, and even though she helps him rescue a goat from certain doom, he’s still a big jerk. Later, when they’re properly introduced so he can help with her research, it’s the classic rom-com moment where she has the surprise realization that “Oh, that’s the person who was so rude to me earlier.” It’s not the most original way to have two characters meet, but at least the show quickly moves past it. It helps that Danes and Hiddleston have an antagonistic chemistry that’s a lot of fun to watch play out, even with the familiar setup.

“There’s always something new to find.” — Tom Hiddleston on a decade of playing Loki

The other, much more interesting subject the show leans on is the faith vs. science debate. Cora’s desire to find a logical explanation for the serpent — she spends a lot of time putting on nice outfits to go digging for fossils — comes in direct conflict with most people in town, who become increasingly convinced that it’s the work of a vengeful deity. What makes the dynamic particularly interesting in The Essex Serpent is Will, who is stuck in the middle. He’s a man of faith who also can’t accept the supernatural explanations for everything affecting the town, leaving him questioning quite a bit about his beliefs and how much he can help the community he serves.

To add even more drama into the proceedings, the show ends up being much more about interpersonal relationships than existential ones (though the serpent and religion still remain key elements throughout). The Essex Serpent puts a lot of very beautiful people in a very grim location and then lets you watch them try really hard to not be overtly horny for each other. Cora is finally experiencing something close to freedom now that her abusive marriage is over, and she ends up stuck between Will (who is not only a pastor but also married with two kids) and Luke (Frank Dillane), a charming young doctor who also happens to be a pioneering force behind the at-the-time nascent field of open-heart surgery.

Much of the show hinges on watching the three of them navigate this awkward dynamic while being too British and polite to just come out and say how they feel. This is balanced with all of the aforementioned struggles like finding a mythical sea serpent or perfecting a radical kind of surgery. It’s a slow burn of a show, which doesn’t reveal its true intentions until a few episodes in. But once it finds its footing, The Essex Serpent becomes a drama that treats its subjects with a refreshing kind of honesty that makes them all the more interesting. Falling in and out of love is always messy, but especially when the world around you is also a complete mess. The Essex Serpent captures that perfectly. And at six episodes long, it does so without overstaying its welcome.

Really, it’s a show about the beautiful chaos that comes from conflict, whether that’s between science and faith, love and hate, or putting a bunch of pretty people in a grim and depressing little town. In that way, the cozy sweater is a metaphor for The Essex Serpent as a whole: its drab and well-worn exterior hides something much more intriguing underneath.

The Essex Serpent starts streaming on Apple TV Plus on May 13th.

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Sarah Perry The Essex Serpent

This book was recommended to me by a friend who said it reminded him of a Jane Austen book, and I see one of the reviewers says it is Dickensian in style, so as these are two of my favourite authors I felt sure that this book was for me. However, I now realise that Perry also wrote Melmoth, which makes me slightly more cautious and wonder if this Essex Serpent novel would suit me, as I did enjoy Melmoth and it was a great read but I struggled with the ambiguity of it and the lack of clear answers. I guess I will soon see if that was just Melmoth or if it is her style in general.

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry available on Amazon  Kindle  Hardback  Paperback  Audiobook

Home » Book Reviews » Sarah Perry » The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

I love the front cover of Essex Serpent, with the embossed words and the green glittery spots on the serpent’s body. 

The book starts on New Year’s Eve, a drunk man celebrating the evening goes down to the edge of the Blackwater Estuary to clear his head, and decides to take a swim. He is familiar with the estuary and has swum there before, but it is very dark when the moon goes behind some clouds and something seems to alter in the surface of the water making it go very still and then move with an uneven motion, and he also thinks he sees something large in the water. He begins to feel afraid, sensing that the thing in the water is waiting and watching him. Then the moon comes out from behind the clouds again and he feels that he has been silly and confused and affected too much by drink, so he takes that swim. Hmmm, so there is no year stated, I wonder when it is set, the blurb about the book describes it as a historical novel, so I am presuming it’s not modern day. Actually I see on the back of the book that it’s set in 1893, but it’s strange that this isn’t stated in the text. And presumably the Blackwater Estuary is in Essex. And I was worried about him swimming at night after he’d been drinking (which seemed very foolish) even before his feeling that something was in the water, but, oooh, Perry has built up the apprehension and tension incredibly well with her darkly descriptive words of the water, ‘the estuary slow and dark…something alters in a turn of the tide or a change of the air, the estuary surface shifts…nearer he goes, not yet afraid…clouds hide the moon and he’s blind…(it’s) as if something out there has displaced the water…he thinks he sees, is certain he sees, the slow movement of something vast…there’s something there…biding its time…with an eye cocked in his direction’. Shiver, shiver, shiver! And presumably this is the Essex Serpent. But does the man survive his swim in the water, or not? This preface ends without us being told…!

Dr Luke Garrett is on an Underground train on his way to the funeral of a patient, Michael Seaborne, who recently died of throat cancer. While attending Michael during his illness, Luke fell in love with Michael’s wife, Cora. Luke also noticed during his time at their house in Foulis Street, that Michael enjoyed fostering a feeling of unease and was a ‘malign influence’ in the household, particularly so with his wife. In the house is also their son, Francis, and his nanny, Martha, who is very close to Cora and protective of her. Cora is very keen to educate herself and asks Luke lots of questions about surgery, and also speaks to him of her fascination with fossils. Even though Michael has now died, Luke still goes to the house in Foulis Street every day, and Cora always seems pleased to see him. Cora is getting dressed for the funeral and fingers a scar on her neck which Michael inflicted on her. She analyses her feelings now she is a widow and decides it isn’t a happiness that she feels but is more of a relief. She remembers how awed she was by Michael when her father first brought him home to meet her, she being then 17, and she was married to him two years later. Her mother died when she was young. Francis is aged 11 and collects items he views as talismans or treasures, such as feathers and stones and the fur of the family dog and bits of fabric, all of significance to him in some way, and he displays these in his room in complex patterns and carefully chooses which ones he takes with him when he goes out, such as to the funeral that day where he takes one for him, one for his mother, one for his father, and one for Martha. He is often a puzzle to his mother, and he declines the comfort she offers on their way to the funeral. During the funeral, Cora wonders what Michael was like in his office as an MP and if he was kinder there than he was at home. She looks across at Luke and thinks of him as ‘her friend’ although recognises that he has an ‘ability to bring about such total reversions in her mood’. Martha reflects on Michael’s cruelty to his wife and remembers her own hatred for him and how she had felt she could have killed him for how he hurt Cora, but she also remembers how Cora came to her for comfort after his cruelties and how pleased she was to be able to give that comfort. Hmmm, Michael does not at all sound like a nice man, obviously mentally and physically cruel to his wife. And something about Luke makes me think he’s quite an arrogant man, and I’m not really hoping that Cora ends up with him. Martha seems lovely and obviously cares deeply for Cora, it seems like she’s been the only one to show care to Cora and to try and comfort her. Francis seems interesting, I wonder if he is autistic, but it’s a shame that Cora hasn’t found comfort in her life with him. And this chapter begins in January but it’s not clear if this is immediately after the previous chapter (with the man deciding to swim in the water on New Year’s Eve) or years afterwards, as there is still no date given in the text. 

I’ve also noticed that Perry writes in an almost poetical style, mentioning or implying the same word a couple of times in one sentence but with opposite aspects given to it, for example with the word bells, ‘oranges and lemons rang the chimes of St Clement’s, and Westminster’s division bell was dumb’, and I see the same example with the words ‘ice’ and ‘time’ too. She also uses contrasting words or images in the same sentence, such as ‘terraces and tenements’ and ‘high society and low company’. It’s interesting to read and makes me think that Perry has a love and affection for words, and that she has spent quite some time and care devising her sentences, which makes me warm to her. 

Cora has gone to Colchester in Essex with Martha and Francis, as some fossils were discovered there after a landslip. Martha is not happy being there, as she thinks the locals are all ‘half-wits’ and is astonished that coffee can be bought there, though is disgusted at it when she tastes it. However she likes seeing Cora more relaxed and cheerful as she is there. Cora, to Martha’s disapproval, speaks with a crippled beggar who tells her of the earthquake in the town in April eight years ago, and also tells her about the Essex Serpent which he says the earthquake has brought forth again. He says the serpent was first seen in 1669 and then disappeared for over 200 years until the earthquake shook something loose under the water and set it free, he says it is more like a dragon than a serpent and can survive both on land and in the water, and says that the first man who saw it lost his mind and was put in an asylum where he died but he made several drawings of the creature. Cora is fascinated by this. They bump into a colleague of Michael’s from London, there with his wife, Charles and Katherine Ambrose, both of whom Cora greatly likes, and they go to a cafe together. The Ambroses offer to introduce Cora to their friends, Reverend Ransome and his wife and children, who live very close to the area where the fossils were found and who could take her along the coastline and guide her. They also share what they’ve heard about the Essex Serpent, saying that a man was found at the edge of the water on New Year’s Eve with his neck broken. Cora is very excited now, thinking that the serpent could even be an animal presumed to be extinct. She also wishes she could say more privately to Katherine about how she feels now Michael is dead, that ‘her years of marriage had so degraded her expectation of happiness that to sit cradling a teacup with no thought for what waited behind the curtains on Foulis Street seemed little short of miraculous’. Oooh, I was fascinated by the earthquake, I am guessing that really happened? I will have to google for more details. And I was fascinated by the stories of the Essex Serpent! So the man who entered the water in the preface was killed and this happened as the main story began. I chuckled at Martha’s view of Essex, as determined by the coffee! And I loved that Francis, whilst in bed with a cold, had begun reading Sherlock Holmes stories, good for him, and I’d imagine Holmes’ rigid logic would appeal to Francis. I also very much liked Charles, with him ordering in the cafe ‘at least a dozen of the cakes…and a gallon of tea’. But poor Cora’s remembrance of the dread she used to feel about her home, due to her husband waiting there, was really sad.

Reverend Will Ransome receives Charles Ambrose’s letter asking him to make Cora welcome if she visits the village and giving her contact details. Will doesn’t like the sound of Cora, thinking of her as an elderly lonely widow who has latched onto fossil-hunting as a fad. He takes comfort from the thought that his village, Aldwinter, doesn’t have much to recommend it. He is also annoyed at the local people’s belief in the Essex Serpent, their ‘godless superstition’ as he calls it, and their belief that the sins they have committed has brought the creature on them as a judgement, and he is determined to stifle these rumours if he can. He walks through the village and talks to some of the residents, Henry Black who travels up and down the estuary in his barge, transporting goods that Will suspects may not be legal, and Mr Cracknell who lives alone at the final house in the village, which is close to the edge of the marsh and estuary, and who ‘feels’ that something is out there. Heading home as night approaches, Will thinks of his wife and children and ‘felt such a rush of joy that he gave a quiet shout’. Awww, I like Will, he seems very much a family man, very different from the men so far in the book, Michael and Luke. And I liked the description of some of the trees in the village, the historic old oak tree in Aldwinter with its down-curved lower branches forming seats, and the ash trees with their bare branches looking ‘like so many grey feathers stuck in the ground’.

Cora writes to Luke inviting him to visit them in Colchester, saying ‘I miss you, I don’t like to do without you’. Luke replies that he will come with his friend, Spencer, probably next week. Cora has gone for a long walk, alone, wanting to escape Francis counting the feathers in his pillow. It has begun to rain and she has walked eight miles out of Colchester but she is enjoying nature around her, ‘birches unfurled their strips of bark like lengths of white cloth’ and she thinks that the green moss looked like ‘wads of green fur swaddling the trees’ and she listens to ‘a chattering thrush’, feeling that the happiness she now feels allows her to fully notice and appreciate all this nature, and she sometimes laughs out loud with the joy of it. She reflects that she had loved Michael but that she had been too young to deal with his moods and sternness and remoteness and his ability to ‘lay her waste’ and how that love had turned to fear. She thinks also of Francis and how she had felt he was an ally and had worshipped him when he was born, but within weeks of his birth he seemed filled with rage and struggles and she felt he had also rejected her love. She also thinks of Martha and how close they are and how much she needs her. She comes across Will trying to pull a drowning sheep out of the water, and helps him, although she firstly thought he was harming the animal and had shouted at him to stop. They don’t introduce themselves to each other, and Will dismisses her curtly once the animal is saved and walks off after directing her to the local pub where she can get a taxi back to Colchester. Hmmm, I’m disappointed that Cora has urged Luke to visit her, as even if she doesn’t have feelings for him (and I hope she doesn’t) then I think she is encouraging him to believe that she has feelings for him. And Will and Cora’s first meeting didn’t go well! Though I like Will again for his kind-heartedness in trying to rescue the sheep, and I like Cora’s concern and her bravery in trying to intervene when she thought a creature was being hurt.

Will’s daughter, Joanna, who is 12, has brought her brother John aged seven, and her friend Naomi Black, to an old boat wreck on the edge of the estuary in late afternoon in order to make a sacrifice to appease the Essex Serpent. This involves burning pieces of paper with their names on and chanting and holding their hands over the flame of a fire she has made in a circle of stones, and doing all this after not eating that day. Joanna knows she has influence over the other two and enjoys the drama of play-acting infront of them. As they leave for home, now it is nearly dark, they all think they see ‘a curious thickening and rising of the water…a movement that was too swift and directionless to be the casting of a wave’. They are met by Cracknell who scares them with his tales of the Essex Serpent and having ‘seen it myself twice or thrice when the moon’s bright’. Their father then comes across them, so muddy from the incident with the sheep that they almost don’t recognise him, and takes them home, ‘a child in the crook of each arm’. Oh, bless him, I was quite worried about little John getting hurt in this sacrifice, and he was so sweet worrying about missing his dinner. And oooh, I wonder if the children did actually see anything in the water, or if it was just their vivid imaginations heightened by the drama that Joanna had created.

Stella Ransome writes to Cora inviting her and Francis and Martha to dinner, along with Charles and Katherine, saying it is ‘the chance to see old friends and make new ones’, and enclosing a pressed primrose. Luke and Spencer have arrived in Colchester, Luke repeating to Spencer the phrase from Cora’s letter, ‘I miss you, dear’, and adding with ‘his wolfish grin’ that ‘the woman begged’. Spencer asks if they will see Cora that night, ‘he had motives of his own for this display of impatience, but having successfully concealed them even from Garrett’s forensic gaze was unwilling to show them’. Spencer goes for a walk and comes across the crippled beggar outside the ruined house, and he gives him all the money in his pocket, feeling guilty of his riches. As he is being shown over the threshold of the house, Martha comes up and takes Spencer back to their room at the hotel. Francis’ latest obsession is with feathers and Martha has brought several back for him, which he proceeds to thread onto Spencer’s coat. When Luke arrives later, greeted enthusiastically by Cora, Francis stops threading the feathers and instead begins collecting them all up, counting them down from 367. Martha and Spencer talk naturally together. Spencer admires her greatly, asking her to educate him about her socialism beliefs and passion for better housing for the poor of London. She likes him for how patient he is to Francis and how kind he is to Cora, but disapproves of his enormous wealth and privilege. Cora talks to Luke of the Essex Serpent and her theory that it might be a dinosaur who has escaped extinction, and reminds him that a fossil of a plesiosaur had recently been found at Lyme Regis. Awww, I straight away liked Stella just from her note to Cora, it’s written so naturally and in such an honest friendly manner, she seems like a genuinely lovely person. And I didn’t like Luke seeming to gloat over Cora’s ‘I miss you, dear’ in her letter. Admittedly I did regret that Cora had written that as I didn’t want to think that she had feelings for Luke as I’m not convinced that he is suited for her, but now he seems almost arrogant and presumptuous regarding her, grrrr. And oooh, I was very intrigued what ‘motives of his own’ Spencer was concealing from Luke, I had wondered if he was concealing his own romantic feelings for Luke, with how he seems to look out for him, providing him with money but doing this surreptitiously so as not to wound Luke’s pride, and putting up uncomplainingly with Luke’s curtness. But no, it’s Martha who Spencer likes. I’m not sure what I think of this either, I like that he values her as I like Martha myself, but I’m not sure they’re suited. I do like Spencer though, far more than I like Luke, he seems kind and thoughtful and generous. I also liked some of the descriptions of nature in these chapters, such as ‘the high clouds hurried on to pressing business in another town’. And there’s more things for me to look up on Wikipedia, not just the Essex earthquake but also the plesiosaur found at Lyme Regis.

While Stella awaits her guests, she thinks of her 15 year marriage to Will and how much she loves him and how strong they are together. When Cora arrives, she and Stella like each other immediately and speak very naturally together, complimenting and delighting in each other. Will and Cora realise that they have already met at the incident of the drowning sheep, and resort to helpless laughter at the memory, to the puzzlement of the others. When they have explained all this, to everyone’s amusement, they all go into the dining room for dinner and Cora notices how homely the small and humble room feels in comparison to Foulis Street. Will tells them that he had seen Cracknell earlier in the day, whose goat, Gog, had died, Cracknell insisting that the Essex Serpent had killed it by frightening it to death. Stella has a coughing fit towards the end of the evening and heads off early to bed, but as Cora is staying at their house overnight she tells her that she looks forward to spending more time with her the next day and promises to show her the village and the serpent carved into the church pew which she refuses to let Will remove. I do like Stella, and I like that she is interested in everyone she meets ‘without ever being heard to speak ill of anyone’, and I love her and Will’s bond. But I can’t help being a little concerned about Cora and Will’s closeness and ease together and them frequently bursting into laughter, I am pleased that Cora has a friend and they seem to be good for each other, challenging each other’s and their own thinking and yet valuing the other’s opinion, but I definitely don’t want anything to harm Stella and Will’s relationship, or for Stella to be hurt. And I’m worried about Stella’s cough and that it could be something serious and fatal, I really really hope not.

Spencer writes to Charles asking for his advice on how he can best use his trust fund to help the housing situation for the poor. Cora writes to Stella, on their return to the hotel in Colchester, inviting her and the children to visit them, and enclosing a note and leaflet for Will, the leaflet being a copy of the original pamphlet years ago warning about the Essex Serpent. She receives a pleasant letter back from Will, friendly and joking about the serpent and welcoming her back to Aldwinter should she wish to come. A few weeks later Cora and Martha and Francis move to a house in Aldwinter which Stella had told them of, Cora being determined to research the Essex Serpent more thoroughly. Hmmm, I want to just be pleased that Cora has friends in Will and Stella, and a purpose with the Essex Serpent, but I can’t help feeling just a bit worried about what the friendship with Will may lead to. And awww, Spencer must think a lot of Martha, with him wanting to take action and help, rather than to just talk about helping.

Luke is notified by his friend at the hospital that there is a patient there who would benefit from heart surgery. This type of surgery has never been done before but Luke is full of self-confidence in his ability to do it. The senior surgeon tries to bar his entrance when Luke arrives at the hospital, telling him he cannot do this surgery as he will bring disgrace on the hospital and risk the life of the patient. But Luke’s determination is obvious and he is allowed to see the patient, whose mother agrees to the operation after Luke explains that her son will be dead by morning if this is not tried. Spencer helps him during the surgery, and it is a success. Afterwards and in private, Luke shakes and cries with tension and relief. Hmmm, the surgery Luke does sounds a dramatic breakthrough but I was a bit apprehensive that performing it would make Luke even more boastful and self-confident, however I liked him a bit more for being so overwhelmed afterwards by the tension he had felt, showing that he had experienced moments of self-doubt and nervousness.

Cora is having tea and cake at Will and Stella’s house, after Will bumps into her while they were both out walking. They chat about Charles and Spencer and Martha’s work for the poor, but Stella then says she feels tired and needs to lie down, saying she can’t shake the flu that she had at winter. After Stella has left them, they both feel ‘a sensation of freedom…a curious liberty’. Without remembering his rule that no-one but Stella was allowed to enter his study, he takes Cora there to show her a fossil he found on a walk, asking for her opinion, ‘both eager and shy’. They then speak on more personal matters, having first agreed that they will address each other as ‘Will’ and ‘Cora’, instead of ‘Reverend Ransome’ and ‘Mrs Seaborne’, she asking him how he came to be in Aldwinter, saying he could have been successful in one of the big cities and gently telling him he is wasting his talents and his mind and shutting his eyes to the country’s problems by staying securely in his village, and he telling her that she has run away from London and its issues, that she professes to know about science and is trying to lose herself in this but that she barely understands it. They are briefly annoyed with each other but are ‘conscious of having traversed uncertain terrain without serious injury’. He walks her home, and they suddenly together see a ‘strip of pale and gauzy air’ on the horizon of the water, and ‘within the strip, sailing far above the water, a barge moved slowly through its lower sky’, they see the details clearly, ‘flying in full sail, high above the estuary, it flickered, and diminished, then regained its size, then for a moment it was possible to see the image of it inverted just beneath, as if a great mirror had been laid out’. They hold hands, gazing in wonder. Will later writes to Cora from the British Museum, where he had gone for information for a sermon but has instead been trying to find an answer to what they saw, he thinks it is a Fata Morgana illusion and copies out other examples of it which people have recorded, he says it is created when a particular arrangement of cold and warm air creates a refracting lens which makes objects on the horizon seem far above their location, and the image shifts and is mirrored as the air shifts. He admits to not being able to stop thinking about it as it bothers him that his mind cannot be trusted to correctly interpret what his eyes are seeing, and he then wonders if this could somehow explain the Essex Serpent, and he finishes his letter by stating how grateful he is that he hadn’t witnessed it alone and that she was with him. Wow, that’s all very interesting about the Fata Morgana illusion, and yet something else for me to look up on Wikipedia! But I can’t help thinking that them seeing this special thing together will have made a bond between them, and I’m unsure if that’s a good thing as there is Stella to be considered too.

Over the next few weeks, Cora and Will meet frequently to read and study and discuss and argue together. Stella is genuinely pleased that Will has a friend, she still feels weak from the flu and prefers to sit by her window looking out, rather than going out. Luke is disconcerted by Cora’s frequent talk of Will, though she describes him as a brother. Will comes across Francis when out walking and the boy asks him what sin is, saying that Will had mentioned the word several times in his recent sermon, Will is a little stumped but describes it as ‘to try but to fall short’, which then results in further questions from Francis. Cora speaks at Joanna Ransome and Naomi Banks’ school about fossils, the girls ask her about the Essex Serpent and she says that there may be animals alive today like those ones in the fossils, as there are places in the world and the deep ocean waters which haven’t yet been explored. Naomi seems to have a kind of hysterical fit, which then affects the other girls. It is put down to their fear of the Essex Serpent being heightened by Cora’s talk, but Naomi had been abused in the local pub recently, she has kept this a secret and feels ashamed of it and hasn’t been eating or sleeping and is also upset that Joanna seems to be growing apart from her. Cora is uneasy by what happened in the classroom, and writes to Luke asking for his help, saying that ‘something’s here…something isn’t right’. Luke suggests putting Joanna under hypnosis to try and find out more about the incident in the classroom, Stella and Cora are both enthusiastic about this but they hadn’t had a chance to mention it to Will or ask him. Luke also surreptitiously takes Stella’s pulse when holding her wrist, after she says she is hot. Will discovers them partway through the hypnosis and is very angry at this being done to his daughter. Hmmm, interesting with the hypnosis, I will be intrigued to hear Luke’s thoughts on what Joanna said and what it could mean. And I am getting more and more nervous that Stella is ill, with how swiftly concerned Luke was about her.

Martha has been visiting Edward Burton, the patient whose life Luke saved, having been introduced to him by Luke’s colleague, Maureen Fry, Martha knowing Maureen through her socialism work. They, and Edward’s mother, are concerned that Edward seems quiet and weak and like a different person after his surgery. Martha talks to him of her socialist beliefs and he begins to hope for change in the system as she does, as he is very interested in buildings and likes designing them in his mind. He tells her that the injury he suffered was his own fault and he knows who did it and that he deserved it. He explains that he had often led the workplace teasing of an unhappy colleague, Samuel Hall, and he had then seen Samuel with a woman who he clearly loved and Edward had taken this woman in his arms and kissed her, in order to make the others laugh, and then Samual had been off work for the rest of that week, and when Edward had stopped to look up at the dome of St Paul’s, Samuel had bumped against him and ran off, Edward realising a moment later that he’d been stabbed. Martha feels touched that Edward has trusted her enough to tell her this, and she tells him of letting Spencer believe she may in time return his love so she can use his money to do good works, she recognising the guilt she feels in this as similar to guilt that Edward feels about Samuel. I was quite struck by Martha’s words that we can’t help causing harm, that we do it just by living and could only avoid it by shutting ourselves away, never speaking or acting. And I feel sad for Spencer that Martha doesn’t return his feelings. I also chuckled at the phrase ‘lines of laundry running between the houses like the pennants of a coming army’.

Cora is buying supplies in Colchester, to take back to Aldwinter, and is sat eating cake and sharing gossip and reading the newspaper with the crippled beggar, Thomas Taylor. She reads an article from the paper about a meteorological phenomenon called night-shining, which is expected to occur in the next few weeks, when clouds at twilight make the sky look a curiously brilliant blue colour, and the cause may have been the Krakatoa volcano erupting in 1883 and spewing ash into the atmosphere. Charles and Katherine discover them, as they walk by, and Charles tells Cora off for upsetting Will and asks her if she will apologise, which Cora states she won’t do as Joanna and Stella had given their permission, though Cora has been upset by Will’s silence and cold manner towards her and has missed him. Charles and Katherine also talk to Cora about their concern for Stella, as her letters seem obsessed with the colour blue and they wonder if she is ill, but that Will had called out the doctor who said she was just struggling to shake off the flu. Cora adds that Stella is always hot, and that Stella had spoken to Cora about hearing the Essex Serpent but not knowing what it said, and she remembers that Luke had taken Stella’s pulse and frowned. She writes to Will in a jokey manner saying she won’t apologise and that the scriptures state she should be allowed 489 transgressions before being cast out, and asks why either of their minds should cede to the other. He writes back in a formal way saying she is forgiven and that he had forgotten the incident. Oh dear, more fears about Stella, sigh. I like that Cora is kind enough to spend time with Thomas though, and treats him with respect and courtesy. And the night-shining sounds interesting, I wonder if that will be developed further into this story, and of course I am going to have to go onto Wikipedia yet again to look up noctilucent clouds and night-shining, and Krakatoa erupting! And I do like the occurrence of letters in this book, as a chapter often ends with a couple of letters. 

I’m intrigued that each section of the book is another month (the next being June), so I am wondering if we are seeing a whole year through (although having flicked through the book a few times in order to check, I think we are missing March. Why, I wonder? Though where the March chapter heading should be is a letter dated 11th March, so maybe it is just missing from my copy?). And some of the sections have headings, ‘Strange News Out of Essex’, ‘To Use His Best Endeavour’, ‘To Keep a Constant Watch’, are these quotes from another book, I wonder? I feel with Perry’s writing that all is significant and each word weighed and of relevance and that nothing is included lightly. When I’ve googled ‘Strange News Out of Essex’ I am taken to a passage which says that in 1669 William Winstanley (a writer and historian) published a pamphlet entitled Strange News Out of Essex which details the sightings of a dragon or serpent at Henham near Saffron Walden, and pubs in that area have even been named The Flying Serpent. Omg, so this is all based on a real incident in history (well, not necessarily that there was a dragon or serpent of course, but that people believed that there was in 1669), I know Cora sends Will a copy of this leaflet which she found in a bookshop in Saffron Walden, and that Thomas Taylor had spoken about the serpent being seen before 200 years ago, but I’d just assumed that was part of the story. ‘To Use His Best Endeavor’ seems to be a legal term. And I can’t see that the ‘To Keep a Constant Watch’ means anything, apart from the importance of watching over something important. Perhaps these were all terms in the 1669 pamphlet? Or perhaps they just describe what happens in the following chapters?

Cora is having a party, inviting Will and Stella, and Luke, and Charles and Katherine. Will is apprehensive at seeing her. Stella is tired with the walk to Cora’s, she knows herself that she has consumption, as she has seen blood when she coughs, but she doesn’t intend to tell Will yet, and she has decided that when she gets very ill she will ask Will to take her to a hospital ward in the mountains. When they arrive at Cora’s, Will feels fascinated by her and can’t stop watching her circulating with her guests, wanting to share with her all the things he’d thought and done over the last few weeks while they’ve not communicated. Luke gives Cora a slide that looks like a miniature Japanese fan, it is actually of the very thin lining of the human stomach, set in ebony, which he’d made in college and shown Spencer, telling Spencer at that time that ‘I live in hope of one day knowing someone who’ll think it’s as beautiful as I do’, although he explains none of this to Cora. Will apologises to Luke for losing his temper, and Luke talks to him about medicine, showing him the drawings he has of the heart surgery he one day hopes to perform. There is talk of dancing and Stella pushes Will and Cora to dance together, saying ‘see how well-matched you are’, though they just stand holding one another seeming unable to dance, and Martha and Luke look at them a little fearfully, and Katherine is puzzled at them, as is Francis. Will then says he and Stella must leave, and they immediately go, followed by Charles and Katherine. Later, Will is marching along the common alone in the dark thinking of Cora, he realises that he has always loved her but after holding her tonight he now thinks of her in a physical way as well. After Cora goes to bed, Luke and Martha discuss her and Will, Luke saying that he thinks Cora is unaware as yet of what they’ve done, Martha saying that they have actually done nothing but that every day Cora talks of Will, and Luke says Cora always mentions his name in his letters. Luke says that he would kill Will if he could. And suddenly Luke and Martha go to bed with each other, but both pretending it is someone else they are with. Eeek, I was a bit shocked at Luke and Martha sleeping together! And I wondered who it was that Martha was imagining in place of Luke, was it perhaps Cora that they were both imagining, does Martha have feelings for Cora like that? I had presumed before that it was just a motherly nurturing love that Martha felt for Cora, but perhaps it is more than that. And poor Stella, consumption is tuberculosis, isn’t it? That’s not good! And is Stella trying to ensure that Will won’t be alone after she dies, by engineering him and Cora to dance together? And oooh, Luke has given Cora the slide of the lining of the stomach which was so precious to him, I’m quite touched that he’s done that, and done it without a boastful explanation of his cleverness, perhaps he does really care for her, maybe I’ve been a bit hard on him. And poor Will is suffering too with his feelings for Cora. Oh dear, Cora is unknowingly causing lots of turmoil to people’s feelings. I remember Martha’s words to Edward, that ‘we cannot help it (causing harm) if we are to live…how could it be avoided unless we shut ourselves away, never speak, never act’, and I guess it could be said that Cora is an example of that, she isn’t meaning to hurt these people, she is just speaking and acting and living life. 

Frankie has gone out walking after midnight, as he usually does, puzzling about things like gravity and reflections, and thinking of Stella who also collects treasures, and he has taken two treasures with him on this night’s walk. He is unsettled by the evening with its lack of order and method, but doesn’t know why. He decides to go to the edge of the estuary to see if he can see the Essex Serpent, thinking of the others who say they have seen it. It is the night of the night-shining and the sky looks an odd blue light, and Francis is delighted looking at it. He spots something moving on the sand which crawls along and coughs, and Francis realises it is Cracknell, who tries calling Francis to fetch help. Francis is puzzled at why Cracknell should choose to die there and is distracted again by the night-shining, he then watches with detached interest the process of death come over Cracknell’s body, thinking he will certainly die so there is no point in wasting time getting help and instead decides to share the joy of the sky with Cracknell and pulls his head back so he faces the sky, and Francis then lies beside him looking up at the sky too. Cracknell dies ‘on a long untroubled breath’ while Francis lies beside him and says ‘there, there’, feeling satisfied that things have gone as he thought they would. The next morning Will is angrily hacking off the carving of the serpent on the church pew, to Joanna’s distress who feels ‘for the first time the helpless rage of a child knowing itself wiser and more just than its parent’, but he is interrupted by someone asking him to view something on the sand, and he finds Cracknell’s body with his neck pulled so far back that it was broken, and there are Francis’ two treasures on his chest. The locals believe the Essex Serpent has done it, but Will says that Cracknell was an ill and confused man who probably wandered out in the night for air and got lost. Francis is watching and holds a button with an anchor on which he had torn from Cracknell’s coat. Phew! But Francis didn’t kill Cracknell, did he, pulling his neck back? Was his neck actually broken, or did he just die of his cough? And what was his cough anyway, is it consumption like Stella has, and if so did she get it from him? And so there was to be another mention of the night-shining, it wasn’t just a throwaway thing. There seems to be a few of these nature’s mysteries, with this night-shining and the Fata Morgana illusion, it makes me think of the power and beauty of nature and its influence on us, which I presume Perry was meaning to convey. 

Cora writes to Will saying that she saw the night-shining in the sky. She also explains how she felt about Michael’s death, and how her marriage was with Michael and how she was jealous of the affection that Michael used to show the dog as ‘he never touched me so kindly’. She says she is going to London for a while to stay with Charles and Katherine. She also says that Luke will write to him about Stella and she hopes that he will consider the offer of help. Will replies, sending her a postcard saying he will write again soon. In a later letter, he tells her about Cracknell being found dead, ‘though the coroner says there’s no foul play’, and that Cracknell had likely been there on the sand all night and had been looking up at something. He says that the villagers believe it was the Essex Serpent that killed Cracknell, especially as a few of them had seen a ‘strange blue light in the sky’, and adds ‘I don’t know what to do’. He says that Luke has written and they will go to London next week, and he shares his reservations in the letter about Luke’s enthusiasm for surgery. He writes about his faith and says that he can understand her and Luke’s doubts but that he can’t account for how he feels when he turns towards Christ. And he mentions the ‘longing’ he has for her, that he wasn’t looking for anything new, and how he has ‘learned you by heart, seemed at once to know you, had immediate liberty to say everything to you I could never have said elsewhere’, and equates this to religion and belief in things not seen. He adds that he isn’t ashamed or troubled by these feelings, and ends his letter ‘with love’. Will then writes to Cora six days later, concerned that he’s not heard from her, and also sharing his increasing concerns about Stella. Luke’s letter to Will mentions ‘respiratory disease’. Hmmm, so with Cora writing to Will about her marriage and leaving Aldwinter for a while, was she actually as unsettled by her feelings for Will that night as everyone else was, she did realise then what had happened, though Luke and Martha thought she didn’t realise? And what was the postcard that Will sent, I’m curious as I want to know everything! And I see that Will also puts Philippians 1:3-11 at the bottom of the postcard, so something else I will have to look up, I feel like Perry is educating me with this book! And I feel his letter is quite dangerously intimate with him sharing so much of his feelings, and not just his feelings about her but also his feelings about religion and his uncertainty about how to deal with the villagers, he obviously doesn’t feel that he needs to conceal his uncertainties and doubts and fears from Cora, and the level of intimacy that then demonstrates again makes me apprehensive. And why hadn’t Cora replied to Will’s letter, after she seemed to set the tone of sharing feelings in her letter? And phew, so Francis didn’t kill Cracknell by breaking his neck, thank goodness for that, though it would have been unintended, surely, if he had.

At Stella’s hospital appointment, Luke’s colleague Dr Butler diagnoses tuberculosis. Will is shocked and upset at the news, and surprised at how calm Stella seems, although she says to herself privately that she could have told them this months ago. Will feels uncertain what he should pray for, regarding this, as he feels that if he asks to turn back time to when she caught the infection then shouldn’t he also ask to turn back time and bring back to life those in the village who have already died. Luke tells Will that Stella should be isolated and the children sent away. Dr Butler prescribes injections of tuberculin, which makes Will feel nauseous at the thought, but Luke suggests surgery on the infected collapsed lung, which Will, and Dr Butler, immediately angrily dismiss, although Stella states that it is her body and so her opinion should be considered. Omg, tuberculosis, that’s so sad, I don’t want lovely Stella to die. And I did feel for Will, so uncertain whether his instinct to pray for her is actually selfishness. And I don’t know if the surgery which Luke is suggesting actually ended up being adopted as a treatment for tuberculosis, but I find myself trusting his knowledge and courage, however coldly it is dispensed, and willing Stella and Will to say yes to it.

Naomi Banks has gone missing, she left a note saying ‘coming ready or not’. Cora and Martha and Francis are still in London. Samuel Hall follows and watches Edward Burton every day, holding his knife in his pocket, waiting for another chance to stab him and have his revenge. Luke writes to Cora saying that he loves her, that he carries it about ‘like a growth…it aches’ and lists all the different Coras he has known her be and stating that he loves each one, but it is also quite an angry letter at how he knows she doesn’t return his love, how she tolerates him, and no matter how much he gives it won’t be enough. He feels relief when the letter is sent, ‘like lancing a boil’. Stella seems to be losing her mind, she writes in her blue book about blue things, but also that they have taken her children away from her and they are now living with Charles and Katherine. Oh no, poor Naomi is missing. I don’t like that note she left, it made me wonder if she meant that a baby is coming, following the abuse she suffered. And oh no again, I feel such foreboding with Samuel watching and waiting to strike Edward again. And yet another oh no with Luke’s letter to Cora declaring his love, it quite surprised me how passionate and starkly honest he was about his feelings and particularly how hopeless he knows it is as she doesn’t feel the same. I felt quite sorry for him, and found myself wanting Cora to reply kindly. And again, oh no with Stella (it’s a tough section of the book here!), I do wonder what will happen to her but it is so sad to see her mind disintegrating, and I wonder how the children feel being sent away from her, I know it is to keep them safe from the infection but how tragic that they may not see her again if she dies. 

Edward and Martha and Spencer and Luke and Charles are walking in Bethnal Green discussing housing for the poor. Samuel is watching Edward from a nearby alley, ‘addled with beer and loathing’, he is also watching and hating Luke for saving Edward’s life with his surgery, as Samuel had read about Luke’s success in the newspaper. Samuel runs at Luke, pushing him against a wall and winding him, he is pulled away by Spencer, then Luke sees Samuel take the knife from his pocket and go to attack Spencer and Luke had ‘never felt so appalling a surge of terror’ at the thought of Spencer being killed so he launches himself at Samuel with his hands outstretched. He and Samuel fall to the ground and Samuel’s head hits the pavement and he is dead, but Luke’s right hand and forearm have been terribly cut by the knife. Luke begins listing the bones he can see revealed in his hand, and then faints. Omg omg omg, poor poor Luke to be so terribly injured, I didn’t see that coming! I was worried for Edward, and my only thought of Luke regarding it was how angry he’d be to have saved Edward’s life and then had all his work undone by Samuel killing him. But this will surely end Luke’s career, how can he do delicate surgery now, even if his hand and arm can be repaired somewhat they will surely be compromised, I can’t imagine he’ll have full mobility. What will he do, his whole life is his work! And what about Stella, as I can’t imagine any other surgeon would be brave enough to do the surgery that Luke suggested. But how lovely that Luke acted to save Spencer, realising how much he cared for his friend. But omg, I can’t believe this has happened, and now what will happen?! And grrr, I can see that the next chapter is Cora and her feelings for Will and Luke, when I want to stay with Luke and find out what is happening!

Cora is thinking about both Will and Luke, trying to analyse and identify her feelings. She realises that she had liked Will’s affection because he seemed to have never physically wanted her as a woman, he was too bound up in Stella, but then when they danced that had changed and it made her uncomfortable and like something had been lost. And she is angry at Luke for putting into a letter how he feels for her, making it then impossible for her to lightheartedly and dismissively tease him as she had done in the past when he’d said he loved her before. She is angry that she is only a few months free of Michael’s possession and now Luke seems to want to possess her. She posts a letter to Luke in which she expresses her anger at him, asking how he could have written such things, saying that she loves him too but as a friend and that’s all she has to give to anyone. The following day she writes to Luke again, apologetically, Martha having told her what has happened to him, she says he is the bravest man she knows and such a true friend to Spencer, and begs to be able to see him, and sends her love. Spencer writes to Cora, saying Luke doesn’t know he is writing to her. He says Luke saw her first letter and ‘I would never have thought you capable of such cruelty’, he says that she has hurt Luke very much, ‘where the knife failed, you have succeeded, he is shattered, you have turned out all his lights’. He details the incident and how Luke was taken to hospital, how the muscles and tendons that controlled his fingers had been severed, that Luke asked Spencer to operate but refused any anaesthetic as he didn’t want his mind to be meddled with and he planned to put himself into a hypnotic trance and also to be able to watch and advise on the surgery if he came out of the trance, making Spencer promise that he would only administer anaesthetic if Luke begged him to and giving Spencer guidance beforehand after he had examined his own wounds himself. Spencer said he broke his promise and administered anaesthetic to him once he was in his trance. Spencer said he tried his best with the surgery but it was not enough, that Luke now has shortened tendons which have made his fingers crooked and hooked towards the palm, he can’t write or hold a pen and he refuses to do exercises to try and improve his mobility as ‘he has lost hope…he has no resolve…you cut something out of him’. He adds that her second letter also hurt Luke as she offered pity and she should have known how Luke feels about being pitied. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, the pain she has caused Luke, on top of what he is already suffering, she seems to have an unfortunate instinct of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, and causing pain when she only means to express herself truthfully and to be respectfully honest with the other person. And Spencer’s letter, how curt and blunt and designed to hurt her, which I guess I can understand, it must hurt him so much to see his friend in pain and disabled, so how easy then to take that hurt out on someone else. And how awful for poor Luke to be so dreadfully injured, oh god, this is just so tragic!

Will stops writing to Cora, as she doesn’t reply, and he struggles to be enthusiastic about anything ‘what, after all, is the point of observing this, of encountering that, if he cannot tell her, and watch her laugh or frown in response?’ Cora is ‘bored and bad-tempered…has little interest in her books and bones’, she is angry at Spencer’s letter, and feels lost without Will and Luke, she debates about writing to Will but ‘her pride revolts against it’. Martha writes to tell Spencer that Edward and his mother will probably lose their home as they can’t afford the increased rent. Edward asks Martha to marry him, but she refuses saying she ‘cannot promise to love, honour, obey…don’t ask me to enter an institution that puts me in bonds and leaves you free’. She offers instead to be his ‘companion…comrade’, and Edward accepts. Hmmm, I was intrigued by Martha’s refusal of Edward’s marriage proposal, I am still unsure if she is in love with Cora or not, she tells Edward that she can’t be in the institution of marriage which puts her in bonds, but she also says ‘I see the day coming when Cora Seaborne’s done with me but I can never be done with her’, so is her refusal to Edward based on the institution of marriage or based on her feelings for Cora? I also liked the descriptions of nature at the start of this chapter, they made me hope that perhaps the characters might be about to have a more positive time at last, ‘skeins of geese unravel over the estuary, and cobwebs dress the gorse in silk’, both lovely images that I can easily picture, and again an example of Perry’s use of opposite images in the same sentence which so fascinated me before with ‘unravel’ and then ‘dress’, and also the similar imagery of material with ‘skeins’ and ‘silk’, how does she write so beautifully, do these word formations just almost magically occur to her or does she slave over them for hours? 

Aldwinter wakes to a foul smell which permeates every home and makes people’s eyes water and makes some of them feel unwell. They are all puzzled at what the cause can be, though the villagers all suspect that the Essex Serpent has arrived on the sands and has regurgitated the dead it had taken, so Will goes to the estuary to investigate and the villagers follow him. ‘The carcass of a creature lay in putrefaction…twenty feet in length…wingless…limbless…gleaming silver…all along the spine the remnants of a single fin…very fine teeth…a pair of gills…that resembled the underside of a mushroom’. Will sees that it had been wounded ‘either it had suffered an attack, or caught against the hull of a Thames barge’. Will sees it as ‘a decaying fish…simply an animal’. Banks, the bargeman, advises that they just let the tide and gulls and rooks take the body, rather than them trying to dispose of it in some way, although Will has no idea how they would have disposed of it if they had to. Oh, so this is the Essex Serpent, that’s it, after all this time and wait? What is it exactly, a whale or dolphin who was injured and became trapped in the estuary and died? I felt I had to jot down all the description of it, in order to clarify what it exactly is, although I’m still not quite sure what it is. So nothing supernatural or monstrous, nor a dinosaur who survived extinction? What does this mean for the rest of the book? Although I wonder if this ending of the belief in a monster cleverly emphasises other endings that have come at this point in the book, such as the ending of Will and Cora’s relationship and the ending of Luke’s career and presumably the forthcoming ending of Stella’s life, and perhaps also emphasising the contrast of beliefs that seems to run through the book, belief in religion from Will on one side, belief in the supernatural from the villagers on another side, and belief in science from Luke on another side. But is it shallow in me to be a bit disappointed that it wasn’t a monster or dinosaur?!

Charles and Katherine go to Aldwinter, and Katherine writes to Cora telling her about the Essex Serpent being found after all to be ‘a fish’. Katherine gently rebukes Cora in her letter for breaking her ties with Luke and Will and Stella, saying she presumes Cora is still grieving after Michael’s death, but she also admits to being curious about Cora’s relationship with Will and surprised that they no longer seem to be in touch. Cora replies, explaining that she has written to Luke but they don’t want to see her, ‘I go blundering about, I break things’. She promises to write to Stella and to go to Aldwinter. She goes there with Francis, who is impressed at Stella’s huge collection of blue treasures, such as bottles, shards of glass, buttons, feathers, stones, and bits of paper. Stella is by turns focused on what Cora says and is then vague, is interested in gossip about people and then says that the Essex Serpent is still out there and she hears it whispering in the night, she talks sense and then talks nonsense. Will isn’t at the house when Cora visits, and Stella says that he will be sorry to have missed her. Cora writes to Will saying she has returned to Aldwinter, she says she seems to be in disgrace with everyone, including Francis who is now enamoured of Stella, and she says that only Stella seems not to be angry with her. She asks Will how he is, mentioning several of his habits and asking if he still does them, and finishes her letter asking if she can see him. Will sends a similarly long letter in reply, thanking her for bringing gifts for Stella, detailing the way the village is without the fear of the Essex Serpent, and saying how much he loves Stella, wondering ‘who will I be if she is gone? If she is not looking at me, will I still be here? Will I look in the mirror one morning and find my reflection gone?’. He adds that he goes for a walk every evening at about 6pm, and invites Cora to join him, saying he’d like to see her. They meet and walk together, talking as if they’d never lost contact, both so ‘delighted in each other then as they had from the start’. They talk about the Essex Serpent, Cora calling it an oarfish and saying that there was one washed up in Bermuda and that they ‘loiter near the surface when they’re dying’, and Will saying how powerless he felt to have been unable to say anything to allay the villagers’ fears. They also talk of Stella’s bravery in facing her illness, and Cora talks a little of Michael’s illness and how it felt to watch him become ill and to have a doctor suggest treatments. She talks about forcing her way into Will’s life, with her suggestion that they write to each other, and he says that he had welcomed her, though he didn’t know why as he had everything he wanted with Stella, he goes on to tell her that she walls herself away and has never been loved properly. She tells him to stop, feeling that these kind of intimate words seem safer on paper, ‘he was at his best sealed in an envelope’. They then share an intimate moment together. I loved Will’s words about Stella, questioning who he would be without her and if he’d still see his reflection in the mirror, such beautiful sad words. And I chuckled at Cora feeling that Will was at his best sealed in an envelope, tee hee. And so Cora says the Essex Serpent was an oarfish then, I must look that creature up too (well, unless the serpent is still out there witnessed by Francis, of course…!). And I see oarfish are quite incredible creatures, really huge and very like a serpent in shape, and interestingly their appearance is believed by some to foretell disasters such as earthquakes.

Luke and Spencer are in Colchester, and Luke is walking alone in the countryside at night, feeling angry at how useless he feels he has become, and embracing the extra pain from Cora’s letter which he carries with him. He decides to end his life, now he has lost his ambition and also lost the hope of love from Cora, and he feels that no-one would really grieve for him. As Luke prepares to hang himself from a tree with his belt, he suddenly thinks of Spencer and how he will be worried at his absence and perhaps come searching for him and would then find him dead, and how hurt and sad he would be. Luke thinks about how long they’ve been friends and how much they have been through together. He then feels angry and humiliated that he has been prevented from killing himself because of a friend, rather than because of his career or the lack of love of Cora. Luke returns home in a rage and hits Spencer, knocking him down, saying ‘if it hadn’t been for you it would all be done with now’. Spencer apologises and says he’s not going to go away. Awww, lovely Spencer, he really is a true and loyal friend. But poor poor Luke feeling so desperate and hopeless. 

Meanwhile Banks is sat drunk by a fire on the sands of the estuary in the fog, still convinced that the Essex Serpent is out there and that it has his daughter. Francis then appears and asks him ‘did you see it?’, saying he knows that is why Banks is out there. Banks feels unnerved by Francis so says he can see barely anything through the fog, but then Francis grabs his hand and tries to pull him towards what he says he’s seen. Banks then hears a groaning noise, and he runs home in fear. Francis stays out there and the fog briefly clears and he sees what it is, he feels relief and disappointment and then mirth, and as the fog covers it again he decides he needs to tell someone so decides he will tell Stella. Grrrr, that’s so frustrating that we don’t find out what Francis has seen!  

Cora writes to Will, saying she feels no guilt for what they did and urges him to keep guilt at bay, and says ‘we are cleaved together, we are cleaved apart, everything that draws me to you is everything that drives me away’. Hmmm, I was quite fascinated with her explanation of the word ‘cleave’, with it meaning two very different things, to cling to something with all your heart and also to break something apart, that’s quite profound, I will remember that.

Francis goes with Martha to see Stella, he tells her that he was down at the estuary in the early hours of the morning wanting to see the Essex Serpent as he thinks it may still be out there. Stella says that she is certain it is still out there and that she hears it whispering ‘coming ready or not’ to her. He tells her what he’d seen on the edge of the estuary, and she is at first disappointed and then laughs, as Francis had done. They agree that they must show people and Stella draws a plan in her notebook for how they will do it. Francis notices her feverish eyes and trembling hands and wonders if he should get help, but he is flattered and proud to be wanted, and promises to help her complete her plan tomorrow. Martha sees Francis sitting on Stella’s lap with his arms around her neck, and realises the irony of Will’s wife and Cora’s son being so close. Omg, why does Stella have written in her book the same words as Naomi left in her note when she disappeared? Maybe Will told her what Naomi’s note said? And what is Stella’s plan? And how can we still not know what it is that Francis saw, grrr?! 

Charles and Katherine and the Ransome children visit Luke and Spencer. Charles breaks it gently to Spencer that Martha and Edward are together, which shocks and wounds Spencer. Katherine tries to draw Luke out and speaks kindly and encouragingly to him, shocked at how pale and thin and depressed he looks, but he doesn’t respond. Out on the street, Joanna suddenly spots a boy sitting begging with the cripple, Thomas Taylor, and recognises ‘him’ as Naomi, even though she is dressed as a boy and has had her long hair chopped short. She immediately runs over and Naomi admits who she is, saying that she left because no-one wanted her after she had the fit in the classroom, especially Joanna, and she was scared to live near the water with her fear of the Essex Serpent. Naomi returns to her dad, saying she’s sorry she went away, that she was scared but it’s all right now. Neither of them say much, though Banks is quietly emotional. The children are taken to see Stella, and all are delighted to be together again. Will thinks about how he will write of his joy at the children’s return in a letter to Cora, and then feels guilty thinking about Cora and of writing to her. He yearns to be with Stella, but remembers that she always wants to be alone now, writing in her blue book. Omg, I can’t believe Naomi is found, I never guessed for a moment that she was the boy that Thomas Taylor had adopted. And I feel like things must have happened to her while she was away, for example why had she cut her hair, was this to disguise her femininity and therefore protect her from people who might have hurt her? It just feels a bit glossed over. And I like that Joanna Ransome has read Little Women, and admires Jo March.

Joanna and Naomi walk along the banks of the estuary, Naomi now confident and quite dominant over Joanna. The fog is still thick, and suddenly they hear a groaning noise and see something on the sand, they are convinced it is the Essex Serpent but then realise it is Banks’ boat, named Gracie after his wife, having partly rotted in the depths of the water and mud, ‘which gave it the look of uneven flesh, coarse and battle-scarred’, moving forward and back with the tide against the shingle. The girls begin to laugh, realising that this is what had scared the villagers, lurching in the water, this was the Essex Serpent. Joanna runs to get her father, saying everyone should come and see it, while Naomi offers to stay with the boat, worried it might disappear into the water again before people arrive. Francis is also there, out of sight in the fog, having followed the instructions that Stella had given him. Hmmm, so this is the Essex Serpent then, this boat is what Francis saw! This seems even more of a disappointment than the oarfish, and I’m wondering why we’re bothering with the boat as the Essex Serpent in the first place as it seemed more fitting that the Essex Serpent was an oarfish. Or at least have one, not both, and I think the oarfish was better. And I’m nervous for Francis and of what Stella, with her confused thinking, has ordered him to do. Oh god, I’ve just had the awful thought that she’s perhaps asked him to put her in the boat, thinking in her confused way that the Essex Serpent will take her off over the water to heaven, particularly as Joanna thought she saw something blue slightly sticking out from under the boat.

Joanna brings Will to see the boat, he is very pleased with them for finding it, realising immediately that this was the Essex Serpent, and grateful that this will be the end of it. He and Joanna and Naomi walk home, Will thinking of telling Cora about this discovery but then wondering if he should contact her again. Francis reaches home and says to his mother, tearfully, that he’s afraid he’s done something wrong, and to her surprise he sits on her lap and hugs her. She takes the drawing he is clutching, which shows a smiling woman beneath a wave and Stella’s writing reads ‘Tomorrow, six, my will be done’. He tells Cora that he went down to the water with Stella, as she had told him she was being called home and that the Essex Serpent wanted her, even though he had told her there was no Essex Serpent. Oh, poor Francis, to be so upset and conflicted at what he’s done. But I guess one good thing is that it has made him closer to Cora, trusting her with his admission and his unhappiness and confusion, so hopefully his ability to do this and to hug her and to allow himself to be hugged by her will continue. But omg, what will Will say to Francis, how angry he will be! And the irony that Will is thinking of how keen he is to share the news of the boat with Cora, and that he will shortly be devastated by something her son has done.

Will and Joanna see Cora running towards them in the direction of the water, she pushes the drawing at Will, saying she thinks Stella is down by the water. They lift the boat, and see Stella underneath it, with all her blue tokens around her. They cover her with their coats and tell her that they’ve come to take her home, though she looks close to death as her skin is blue. Stella opens her eyes and tries to explain the belief that made her go down there, she says she wanted to make peace with the Essex Serpent for Aldwinter’s sake and that she was being called home. Will begs her not to go yet, reminding her that they promised each other that they’d go together and not leave one of them alone. Will lifts her up, saying she has sent the Essex Serpent away and he is now taking her home. Stella tells Cora to ask Francis to give all her blue treasures to the water. Oh god, how sad and tragic. At least they found her before it was too late, I was sure she was already dead. I am wondering though, as the next chapter starts, if she shortly dies through being so weak and being outdoors and damp overnight. And how significant is it that Will and Cora were together when they found her, will this enable Will to be closer to Cora as she shared this trauma with him, or will he feel even more guilty and push her away?

Banks burns his ruined boat. The Ransome children are back with Charles and Katherine in London. Spencer has anonymously bought the Bethnal Green tenement block where Edward and his mother live, and he has ensured each home has been repaired, but without the rents being raised. Spencer has written to Martha wishing her happiness, he says he wishes she had loved him, but that he has now found a purpose due to her. Martha has had articles published, using a typewriter given to her by Cora, she misses Cora now she doesn’t live with her but no more than she often missed her when she did live with her, and ‘in the absence of Cora, it’s Edward Burton she wants’. Spencer has moved in with Luke, saying that as Luke saved his life then he is now Luke’s possession and responsibility. Luke is glad that Spencer is with him, though doesn’t say it, and is sustained by his loathing of Cora. His hand has healed though he doesn’t have full mobility, but Spencer has suggested a partnership between them at the hospital, where Luke guides Spencer in surgical operations, and Luke is now more enthusiastic and re-energised. Awww, lovely lovely Spencer, I would have liked a happy ending for him, but perhaps him finding love would have taken him away from Luke, and it seems like his purpose is giving Luke a reason for living, as well as his other purpose of improving housing. Although is it fair that Spencer sacrifices his life for Luke? I guess we may see towards the end of the book just what that entails. And what were Martha’s feelings towards Cora in the end? Just a wish to look after her, or something more? And why is Martha not with Cora now? Is it because Cora is with Will, or is Cora focusing fully on Francis with their improved relationship, or is it just because Martha has chosen to live with Edward? And why are the children back with Charles and Katherine? Even if Stella has died, then surely they would be with Will?

Stella has survived, she is weak but walks round the common with Will every week, he relays the village gossip to her, they talk together about the children, and they are close again and laugh together. Will is ‘maid and mother’, doing the cooking and cleaning. Stella looks back proudly at what she sees as her defeat of the Essex Serpent, though she sometimes misses her blue treasures, which all went into the estuary. Dr Butler is pleased with how she is doing, saying it is a question now of management. Will determinedly never thinks of Cora while he is with Stella, though it is ‘by an effort he thinks might one day halt his heart’, but allows himself to think freely of her on his daily walks alone where he analyses what she is to him, feeling that he doesn’t miss her because she is everywhere around him, ‘in the yellow lichen wrapping the bare beech branches, in the kestrel he once saw skimming the oaks’, and is unable to decide how to name her or their relationship, he decides ‘she is my friend’. He doesn’t write to her but imagines he knows what she is thinking and that she knows what he is thinking, ‘their conversations go on, in the downspin of a sycamore key’. Cora writes to Will saying she is at Foulis Street again, but on her own, with Francis away at school and Martha with Edward. She describes the simplicity of her days, and says that solitude suits her. But she says she thinks about the Essex shore and can taste its salt on her lips, and feels her heart cleaving, ‘something severed, and something joined…I am torn and I am mended, I want everything and need nothing, I love you and I am content without you’. She ends her letter ‘Even so, come quickly!’.

Well, that’s the end. Phew! I’m pleased that Stella is still alive and seems to be doing well, I am surprised but pleased as I felt sure she would have died. She seems stronger in her mind now too. And I loved the beautiful words about lichen and the kestrel and the sycamore key describing how Will feels that Cora is all around him. And of course, the book rightly ends with Cora, seeing as it began with her. And I feel it is perhaps fitting that she is back at Foulis Street where she was dominated by Michael, now on her own and answerable to no-one, just pleasing herself, and I can’t help feeling that she deserves that after everything she suffered with Michael and that perhaps it would have been better if she’d done that straightaway, just recuperate and recover, and then go out into the world and mix with Luke and Will, perhaps she would have done less damage then if she’d tended to her own needs first, though I feel she never meant to do damage but perhaps as damage was done to her she needed to repair this first? But it seems to be implied at the end that she and Will are meant to be together, and will be together. And I’m not quite sure how I feel about that. I have to remember that Cora had been treated badly by Michael and was hurt and vulnerable, so I should be happy for her that she has found happiness and love with someone, and as her happiness seems to be with Will then perhaps that is what I should wish for her. The book feels mostly about her journey (rather than a monstrous Essex Serpent), her being able to grow after she was so stifled and crushed down by Michael, and even the mistakes she makes and the hurt she causes along the way are all part of her growing and coming out of her shell and developing the kind of person she will become, after she married Michael so young and he then dominated her and shaped her and subdued her into the person he wanted her to be. So the fact that the book begins with her becoming free and able to make mistakes and learn and try new experiences and follow new interests, just free to do what she wants, is wonderful and I’m very pleased for her and have enjoyed watching her begin to enjoy life, that feels a success story. And Will does seem to suit her very well, with how similarly their minds work and that they challenge each other and push each other to defend and develop their own ideas and beliefs, and yet how they listen to each other and value each other’s opinion and often then try to incorporate the other’s ideas and beliefs into their own lives, and how they laugh together (I feel Cora had rarely laughed up to that point). But then Will is married to Stella, arrrgh! And Stella is lovely, and he loves her. And Cora does have some aspects of the things she shares with Will, with other people too, admittedly not all contained within one person as she does with Will, but the other people in her life do bring value to her and I think do also help shape how she grows and develops now she is free, so it’s not just Will as her only influence or route to freedom. And I wonder how Will would view his future relationship with Cora, if he would be content to just be friends or want more, he obviously needs her in his life but I’m not quite sure as what, though I suspect as more than friends really. I guess it wouldn’t be such an effective book if Perry had let Will be single and unmarried, and he and Cora then lived happily ever after, as the power of the book and her writing comes from how it makes you feel about the characters and how you question what is best for them. 

It’s interesting to consider all the different kinds of relationships that are in the book, obviously Cora and Will’s is the main one, but Spencer and Luke’s is also fascinating, and I think my favourite relationship is Charles and Katherine’s, as they seem very loving and yet also very equal to each other, and he’s quite individual with his quirks and obviously very confident to be that way and I’d think a fair amount of that confidence comes from being loved and accepted by Katherine, and they must be completely secure in their relationship too to be able to deal with the challenges that taking in the Ransome children would no doubt have brought. I think Charles may be my favourite character too, obviously his love of cake and tea is a massive tick in his favour, tee hee, but I like his eccentric and individual style and his generosity and humour, and also how loving and kindhearted he is to the Ransome children, drawing them out and building their confidence, and he can relate to a mix of different people too as he knows all the other characters in the book, he could be said to be the central person who links them all actually, and he tries to do good, not just with the housing scheme but also with warning Spencer that Martha has feelings for Edward and trying to save him from getting hurt further.  

And what do I feel about the Essex Serpent being nothing? I don’t think the blurb on the back of the book really made it sound like the Essex Serpent was real, it wasn’t really billed as a supernatural or horror story, but I think at times in the book (especially at the start on New Year’s Eve) I did get caught up in the excitement of it possibly being a real monster or a dinosaur that had survived extinction, and there were so many other seemingly unbelievable things that Perry introduced me to (the Colchester earthquake, the Fata Morgana illusion, the noctilucent clouds and night-shining, etc) that I felt there was a possibility she could surprise me with the Essex Serpent being real too, and I did feel a bit disappointed that it wasn’t real! And I can see it made sense to have the ruined boat as the Essex Serpent, as this then caused Stella to think about being placed there by Francis, but I think I would have preferred it to be assumed that the oarfish was the Essex Serpent, as it is so clearly serpent-like so fits far better and gives us a bit of that monster aspect. So all the injuries and death supposedly caused by the Essex Serpent, especially the man at the start of the book who dies on New Year’s Eve, are just accidents and carelessness, I guess, we’re not saying that the oarfish caused these things?

I was wondering if I felt that the book was Dickens or Austen-like, as it had been described. I can see that the time it is set in is similar, and some of Perry’s beautiful and thoughtful turns of phrase are similar to how those authors expressed things, and their love of language is like Perry’s. And I realise that I am thinking about the book a lot now I’ve finished it and more things keep occurring to me (hence me adding more and more to these notes!) and I keep wondering what Perry meant by a particular phrase or storyline or why she included certain things and what happened to the characters in the future, all of which I feel when I read a Dickens or Austen book, so I can see that there are similarities. 

I do love the way Perry writes and (as I’ve mentioned before) am quite fascinated by her using parallels and opposites within sentences (and I think Cora’s last few lines in her letters demonstrate this oppositeness again), and I think there is an element of her encouraging the reader’s own experience to guide them to come to conclusions about the characters, and that things in the book can be interpreted in different ways, and I imagine that if I was to re-read the book then I would probably see more things and interpret things in a different way than on the first read, the main themes in the book seem to have lots of possible little in-roads and paths to other things. And although some things are ambiguous at the end, this feels a different ambiguity to what was in Melmoth and which I found quite frustrating in that book (as I had so many questions, and wanted answers!), although Melmoth was a completely different book to this one and I think I’d struggle to guess it was written by the same author, which impresses me all over again at the range that she obviously has. 

I certainly feel like Perry has gripped my imagination and she made me eager to research several things she mentioned within the book, particularly the instances of the power and mysteriousness of nature, such as the Fata Morgana illusion, noctilucent clouds and the night-shining, the earthquake in Colchester, and even Krakatoa erupting. It’s interesting why there are so many of these in the book. Some serve to bring people together with their awe of the shared experience, but I wonder if they are also included in order to remind us that whilst the characters are going about their lives and developing relationships and making each other happy (and also hurting each other), they are really fairly insignificant compared to nature and what she can do. And perhaps the fossils are mentioned also in order to demonstrate the longevity of nature, compared to the characters’ (and our) little lives and problems.

I’m interested in the Author’s Note at the end saying she was struck with how similar the Victorian age actually was to our own modern time, with the beliefs and lifestyle problems. It makes me wonder if this is why she didn’t put in the text the date the book is set in, as maybe she wasn’t wanting to pigeon-hole it and have the reader view the story and characters on their preconceived ideas of that time, so almost allowing the reader to wonder if it is actually our own time? And oooh, she says that the titles of the book’s four parts are taken from the text of the 1669 pamphlet Strange News out of Essex, about the Essex Serpent. Well, I appreciate her appreciating that the reader may wonder and desire an explanation, and I like how she has subtly and cleverly tied her story to that pamphlet too. 

And I was also interested in the Reading Group Questions at the back of my copy of the book. One of the questions referred to the choice Cora made by saving her rival Stella rather than letting her drown, which really quite shocked me as it hadn’t even occurred to me that Cora would consider not acting to save Stella, so it’s interesting then to find out how moral I obviously view Cora. 

I loved how many books were mentioned within this book (I imagine displaying Perry’s love of books), especially Cora listing the books that she was reading at Foulis Street, ‘Bronte and Hardy, Dante and Keats, Henry James and Conan Doyle’, all good choices, and part of me wonders if she needs anything else but her books, tee hee! It makes me want to re-read many of the books mentioned, such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes , and I always feel I should read more Thomas Hardy so Cora mentioning that she was reading him has inspired me again, I remember being very affected by Tess of the d’Urbervilles so perhaps I’ll try that one again. The use of letters in Essex Serpent to tell some of the tale also reminded me of Wilkie Collins’ novels ( The Moonstone , and The Woman in White ) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula , and made me tempted to re-read those books. And it also reminded me a little of Diane Setterfield’s Once Upon a River with the beautiful language used. And I’m keen to read more of Perry’s books, and oooh, After Me Comes The Flood sounds very very intriguing!

Related Book Reviews:

• Melmoth by Sarah Perry
• Melmoth The Wanderer by Charles Maturin
• Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
• Tales from the Perilous Realm by JRR Tolkien
• The Romance of the Forest by Ann Radcliffe
• Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart

More Sarah Perry Book Reviews

Latest book reviews, privacy overview.

BOOK REVIEW: The Essex Serpent

The Essex Serpent By Sarah Perry Published 2 June by Serpent’s Tail, £12.99 hardback & ebook

If you love strong heroines, historical fiction that wears its research lightly, authors who handle large casts as adeptly as DeMille behind the megaphone, and novels with a vivid sense of place, then The Essex Serpent is your dream date.

TES takes place over the best part of a year in the 1890s, and it’s set in London and around the marshes outside of Colchester. Young, affluent widow Cora Seaborne moves here with her son and a female companion. Having downplayed her scientific ambitions throughout her marriage, she’s keen to return to her studies and dreams of becoming the next Mary Anning. She hopes to cement her reputation by finding something ancient and wonderful in Essex’s primeval ooze. Her chances seem good, for a mysterious ‘sea serpent’ that first terrorised this corner of England in the 1600s, has allegedly returned. The locals, impervious to logic, are convinced of the monster’s existence, certain that its reappearance is punishment for their sins. Reason tells Cora this isn’t so, but she can’t erase the hope that something does lurk out there, and that she’ll be the one to identify it.

Perry’s writing occasionally reminds me of Dickens, especially when she starts small — a time ball dropping at Greenwich Observatory, for example — then pans out, and still further out, until, in the space of a page or two, she’s conjured an entire, vibrant city full of things to see, smell, hear and taste. She seems to soar over the landscape, catching each of her characters mid-activity, reporting back with the utmost fluency.

She also has Dickens’ knack for humour, poking gentle fun at her characters. (Later I detected a salute to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, and saluted right back.)

Perry employs language deftly and beautifully. For example, when Cora hears about a recent earthquake, she’s amused “to think that modest little Essex, with barely a pleat in its landscape, should have shuddered and broken!” Also typical is this gorgeous description: “Midsummer on the Blackwater, and there are herons on the marsh. The river runs bluer than it ever did before; the surface of the estuary is still. Banks gets a good catch of mackerel early in the day, and notes with pleasure the rainbows on their flanks. Leviathan is decked with spikes of rosebay and willow herb and a rosemary wreath, and a patch of samphire grows at the prow.”

We learn that Cora’s was an abusive marriage, and that her son, Francis, is “odd” — likely on the autistic spectrum, although that term didn’t exist. Thus the two male figures who should love Cora the best have proven incapable of it for their different reasons. If that makes her heartsore, there is solace to be found in the adoration of others. She enchants physician Luke Garrett, Martha, her companion, Essex vicar Will Ransome, and also his wife, Stella. Their love — and the love Cora reciprocates — takes many forms and causes numerous ructions. Perry excels at depicting jealousy with sharp concision.

Essex restores Cora to herself. She goes for long rambles and explores nature with equal parts scientific curiosity and poet’s delight, finding magic in coral-coloured fungus, chattering thrushes, and the wet bark of trees. Out in the landscape she needn’t pretend to be ladylike. She goes without jewellery or stays, gets covered in mud, and eats like a horse. She’s the kind of woman happiest flopping on a sofa grabbing cake with her hands rather than sitting up primly while balancing a teacup.

In Essex she befriends Will and Stella Ransome, and as was normal in those days of frequent mail and no Twitter, their interactions consist not only of face-to-face visits, but an ongoing exchange of letters that read, in the effusive language of the era, like billets-doux . Though the attraction — intellectual as well as physical — between Cora and Will is immediate, they clash continuously. She believes in science and he is a man of God. She often acts without considering the consequences or other viewpoints. They fight bitterly and often, but are always remorseful afterwards.

Wouldn’t they make a great couple, we think? But to his credit, Ransome loves his wife, telling Cora, “I’ve never been a man and not loved her. I can no more imagine life without her than without my own limbs. . . . If she is not looking at me — will I still be here?”

It’s a dilemma and our loyalties are divided, not least because Stella Ransome is good-hearted and intelligent. I defy any reader to wish her ill. On the one hand, Luke Garrett wants Cora badly and is able to offer marriage, but Ransome, despite their ideological clashes, feels the better, if next-to-impossible, fit. He shares Cora’s elemental link to the land; they are both forces of nature.

How can this possibly be resolved if we’re to have a happy ending? Then again, what would a happy ending consist of? Perry puts herself into a tricky situation but resolves it with finesse, bringing to mind the poignancy of E.M. Forster’s admonition: “Only connect.”

The Essex Serpent is equally a novel about change. It’s a snapshot of a world in flux, full of medical advances and social reform, new ideas and new people — women — promoting them. Yet while it’s chock full of ideas, it’s never polemical or less than readable.

It is pacy. There are missing children, murder attempts, surgical experiments, mysterious sightings, parties, and much more. These twists and turns are always character-driven, so they do not feel contrived. Perry deftly juggles perspectives and tenses to give us a full and complex picture of her protagonists and their preoccupations.

(If these descriptions sound at all hazy, it’s my way of avoiding spoilers. I don’t want to tell you what happens, I want you to read the book to find out.)

It’s a relief to sink into an author’s embrace when their arms feel strong and capable. Let The Essex Serpent wrap itself around you — and surrender to its charms.

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3 responses to book review: the essex serpent.

Hi, I finished it a couple days ago and I liked it but I’m not entirely sure of what to think of it and especially about the end.

WARNING – THE QUESTION I’M ABOUT TO ASK CONTAINS SPOILERS

I know no one around me who has read it too and since English is not my mother tongue language, would you mind quickly discussing the end with me? Does Stella die or recover at the end? Did I miss something? The children are still away but something in the way it’s written made me doubt her actually dying, as well as her going outside for walks? And when the doctor comes to visit and says it’s well? Then what happens between Will and Cora? Does Stella die and they get together or what? I assume we’re left to imagine our own ending but the ending we will think of must obviously depend on if Stella heals or die, right?

Hoping you’ll have time to give me your opinion, Chloé

As I understand it, Stella recovers. Will and Cora remain friends. For me, the book is about the power of friendship rather than being a romance that ends with the two main characters walking off into the sunset.

So I didn’t completely misread it – at least one person understood it the way i did, that’s reassuring 😊 Thx for your quick answer.

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The Essex Serpent Review: A Beast-Hunt Gives Way To A Gorgeous, Eerie Gothic Romance

The Essex Serpent looms over the foggy, water-locked town at the center of the new Apple TV+ series of the same name. Nevermind that the residents of the Victorian-era community rarely if ever see the sea creature: it haunts them like a devil, often seeming to kill or capture their vulnerable residents in the night. Enter Cora Seaborne (Claire Danes), a recent widow struck by a wild hair for adventure, who moves to Essex with her young son to track down the legendary monster.

"The Essex Serpent" is a bit of a Trojan Horse, a Gothic romantic drama wearing a folk horror overcoat . But if you can rid yourself of the idea that The Loch Ness Monster's cousin will be around every corner, it's also a thoroughly captivating saga. The six-episode limited series is based on a 2016 novel by Sarah Perry, yet it feels much older than that. In a time of period romance ruled by shows like "Bridgerton" and "The Gilded Age," there's no inescapably modern sheen to "The Essex Serpent." It reads more like a stalwart adaptation of something classic, firmly entrenched in its late 1800s time period, and all the better for it.

A saga based on superstition

Cora's interest in cryptozoology and knack for wearing pants pretty quickly lands her in hot water in Essex, where townsfolk become convinced she's either an enchantress or an incurable source of bad luck. It doesn't help that Cora arrives with a constellation of companions who defy the standards of a nuclear family. Along with her young son, she brings her politically active servant Martha ("In The Earth" actress Hayley Squires), and her experiment-prone physician friend, Dr. Luke Garnett (Frank Dillane, "Fear the Walking Dead") soon follows.

The widow hasn't been in Essex for longer than a few moments when she stumbles upon Will (Tom Hiddleston), a modest and taciturn pastor who's struggling to free a trapped sheep from the watery muck that surrounds the town. Without hesitation, she muddies her clothes alongside him, and a partnership based on practicality, equality, and a strange sort of chemistry is born. Only Will's married, and he's not the only one around who's drawn in by Cora's enthusiasm and beauty.

Despite the great beast in its title, "The Essex Serpent" is a small story. It's content to ruminate on the human connections between these people, the religious superstition of their community, and the vague spookiness of turn-of-the-century life itself. At times, it calls to mind the tales of Daphne du Maurier and the Bronte sisters. The drama's loyalty to the deliberate pace and big emotions of Gothic fiction–which here ebb and flow like the waters along the town's edge–will surely vex some viewers and entice others. Yet the show has enough impressive formal elements to keep it engaging, even when the story occasionally lags.

Progress and the push against it

Filmmaker Clio Barnard ("Ali & Ava") directs, and imbues the setting with a misty edge of danger, as if something just off-screen is about to strike. Word of the monster sets the town into a frenzy, and strange elements–a suddenly mute girl, a class full of kids falling into fits–begin to stack up. Barnard shoots the series as both a dread-building horror fable and a barely-restrained romance, but never lets any shot fall flat. Bathed in pale sunlight and filmed with the snake-like surrounding waterscape always in mind, the series is eerily beautiful. A gorgeous, string-heavy score by composers Dustin O'Halloran and Herdís Stefánsdóttir accompanies the series, and comes to a marvelous, heaving crescendo in the show's penultimate episode.

Romantic entanglements aside, "The Essex Serpent" is obviously about progress and the push against it. Perry's novel is set in 1893, a few years before Stephen Soderbergh's gonzo surgical drama "The Knick," when medical science still bordered on butchery. As a surgeon and researcher who would be right at home in The Knick, Dillane's smirking Dr. Luke is one of the show's most compelling characters, either a cutting-edge practitioner or a mad scientist depending on who one asks. Hiddleston's Will, a man of faith who works doggedly to tamp down local rumor and hysteria, also stands in sharp, somber contrast against most everyone around him.

With its eye turned towards the near-unstoppable spread of misinformation and fear, "The Essex Serpent" tackles topics that are inarguably timely today. Yet it never stoops to winking at modern audiences, instead grounding itself squarely in its engrossing source material and letting its conclusion speak for itself. Ultimately a picturesque, spellbinding Gothic romance with a penchant for atmospheric spookiness, "The Essex Serpent" is a beast that's worth hunting down.

"The Essex Serpent" premieres May 13, 2022, on Apple TV+.

The Essex Serpent review

Apple tv plus' stellar run continues with this starry drama.

TechRadar Verdict

Apple TV's lavish adaptation of Sarah Perry's bestselling novel is a bleak marvel, with Tom Hiddleston, Claire Danes, Frank Dillane and Hayley Squires all delivering superb performances. The script is subtle, the plotting well-paced, and the narrative feels agile as we move through it. At six episodes, the series does not outstay its welcome, nor does anything feel rushed. Perry's story, which is brooding and full of mystery, is brought to life with elegance, grit and real power. A must-watch.

Hiddleston and Danes are cast superbly as the two leads

Dillane delivers a smarmy masterclass

Clio Barnard's bleak visual palette suits the material perfectly

Perry's themes are skilfully handled and translate well to the small screen

The bleakness is unrelenting, don't come here looking for any light among the shade

Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.

Apple TV Plus is having a stellar year. In an ever more crowded streaming market, the service is far more selective than its rivals in where it puts its time and resources, but it’s clearly going for quality over quantity. 

This week’s release continues the fine tradition Apple TV has already laid down with the excellent spy drama Slow Horses and genre-bending thriller Shining Girls as with another prestige drama, The Essex Serpent. 

Adapted from Sarah Perry's 2016 novel, the drama is headlined by Loki star Tom Hiddleston and Claire Danes, the actress' first major role since her long-running turn in explosive drama Homeland . Supporting them are Sense8 and Fear The Walking Dead star Frank Dillane, I, Daniel Blake breakout star Hayley Squires and The Tunnel's Clémence Poésy. 

Clio Barnard, director of acclaimed indie dramas The Selfish Giant and Dark River, has taken charge of all six of the adaptation's episodes, while Anna Symon, whose credits include Mrs Wilson and Deep Water, has provided the scripts. 

The show's first two episodes hit Apple TV Plus today (May 13) with the remaining four episodes dropping weekly after that. 

Moving through the mire...

Perry's novel, which is set in the early 1890s, largely revolves around Cora Seaborne, the role Danes has taken after the show's first casting, Keira Knightley, exited during the pandemic. 

When we meet Cora, she has just been widowed and is about to bury her husband, who it is quickly revealed was a terrible bully who put her through awful and systematic physical and emotional abuse. Now freed from her husband's tyranny, Cora, a woman with a burning interest in the natural sciences, reads about sightings of a mysterious serpent in Aldwinter, a fictional village in rural Essex, and decides to follow her passion and head there, accompanied by her young son and Hayley Squires' Martha, her longtime servant, who has become more like a live-in companion in her years of employment. 

Sad to see her depart for the Essex coastline is Frank Dillane's Dr Luke Garrett, a cocky young doctor who cared for Cora's late husband and has fallen in love with her in the process. 

In Aldwinter, Cora is introduced to Hiddleston's Will Ransome, the village's vicar. A thoughtful man, a world away from the fire and brimstone nature of many of his colleagues in the clergy, Ransom has been struggling to convince his congregation that the Serpent is a myth and to stop hysteria from breaking out among them. 

Initially, Ransome is suspicious of Cora, suspecting she will rile up an already agitated village as she searches for the truth about the serpent and its link to the disappearance of a local girl. He is also concerned for the welfare of his wife, Clémence Poésy's Stella, who is clearly very ill. 

As the narrative progresses, the characters' lives, motives, wants, desires, and fears all become intertwined and a series of complex love stories, both romantic and otherwise, begin to play out. 

Don't come looking for Gods and Monsters

Anyone drawn in by the fantastical and monstrous title will quickly be disappointed by The Essex Serpent. Despite the mythical beast acting as a catalyst for so much of what plays out in the narrative, this is very a human drama. 

Hiddleston has seen so much of his career taken up by his commitments to the Marvel Cinematic Universe that it has been rare to see him out of Loki costume in recent years, but he's on great form here as the deeply-conflicted Ransome. 

Danes' accent is a little up and down at times, but she delivers a sterling turn in a role that so much of the story goes through. Likewise, Squires' passionate, fiery Martha and Dillane's slithery (no pun intended) Garrett are superb supporting pillars. 

None more dark

Clio Barnard's filmmaking history is one of unrelenting bleakness. She first came to prominence with The Arbor, an experimental offering that was part documentary, part feature film, but explored the tragic life of doomed playwright Andrea Dunbar in a profound and heartbreaking manner. She has followed that with The Selfish Giant, another unrelenting slice of misery about two 13-year old boys who find themselves exploited by a local criminal, and Dark River, where she asked Ruth Wilson to go and spend three weeks learning to tend to sheep as part of her preparation for the role about two warring siblings forced back to their family farm. The novel it's based on is set in the South of France, but Barnard transplanted the action to the dark moors of Northern England, and the cinematography and landscapes, all in her grey, washed-out stylings, are on show here. 

Perry's novel makes much of the wildness of the turn of the 20th century Essex, a land where everything is caked in a layer of mud and sodden with rain, and Barnard and her team bring that life here superbly. It does, however, make for a very dour visual spectacle. It's lucky then that the performances more than make up for it. 

Our verdict

The Essex Serpent is a grown-up drama in every sense of the word. Nothing is spoon-fed to viewers, and, while Symon's script is carefully crafted and paced, this is a drama that is as much about what isn't said as what is. 

That does not make it any less compelling though and you'll find yourself drawn in as the narrative winds on. The novel's grand themes, science versus faith, love in all its forms, all set in a time of tremendous change in the United Kingdom as it prepares for the 20th century, are largely skilfully handed, but it occasionally feel like there's too much going on. Perry's book is a large, meandering thing, which uses its supernatural starting point to take a look at society's many social and personal inequalities, and in an effort to try and get that across, the drama does sometimes feel like its focus is less than laserlike. 

The drama where Hiddleston, Danes, Dillane and Poesy is where it really sings and it becomes a complex, compelling and heartwrenching love story completely devoid of schmaltz or cynicism. It's another win for Apple. 

The first two episodes of The Essex Serpent will air on Apple TV Plus today (May 13) with the remaining four episodes dropping weekly.  

Tom Goodwyn was formerly TechRadar's Senior Entertainment Editor. He's now a freelancer writing about TV shows, documentaries and movies across streaming services, theaters and beyond. Based in East London, he loves nothing more than spending all day in a movie theater, well, he did before he had two small children… 

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