Imagine a twelve-year-old girl in fourteenth-century England. Imagine her walled up in a tiny cell to serve an anchoress—a religious woman “anchored” to a church in a miniscule hermitage. Now imagine what this girl and her anchoress might have in common with a modern-day female scholar, grinding away as an adjunct professor. This is the improbable and brilliant juxtaposition in Kristen Holt-Browning’s new work of historical fiction, Ordinary Devotion.
Voices across the centuries
The book opens at Wenfair Abbey, England, in the year 1370. A heavy door closes, and darkness surrounds the narrator amid stone and dirt. Monks labor, bricking over the only egress from the cell. Holt-Browning begins her book with a riveting description of claustrophobia that evokes a visceral sensations of panic. Dread surges with the revelation that the narrator, trapped without escape, is a girl of twelve, who just a few months ago, lived “a different life, in another world, a warm and candlelit place, nothing like this cell.” The black cell seems more satanic than saintly, and in a corner, something rustles—the anchoress, a noblewoman devoted to ceaseless prayer in her living tomb.
Next, the book leaps across time and the Atlantic Ocean, to a college town in New York State circa 2017. A medievalist and adjunct professor narrates the end of her teaching day and stops to browse at the college bookstore. She scans the titles in her field, lingering on a translation of Dante’s Purgatorio, in line with her scholarly work on concepts of purgatory. She muses on the fourteenth century in Europe, trying to bridge the chasm of centuries person to person: “But why not reach across this distance of language, of time? How would it feel to find someone, understand them, despite the years and years stacked between us?” The scholar, who is 10 weeks pregnant, suddenly comes upon another book on the shelves, and can’t resist it.
A devotion to craft
The rest of Ordinary Devotion alternates deftly between the voices of Elinor, the fourteenth-century child servant to the anchoress Lady Adela, and Liz, the twenty-first–century scholar. Shifting voices in a narrative is no easy feat, but Holt-Browning performs it with remarkable skill.
Students of literature can learn much from the structure and style of Ordinary Devotion. The author deploys wonderful techniques of craft to propel the story and make the alternation of voice effortless across place and time. These techniques range from the simple, such as titling each chapter with location and date, to the elaborate, such as weaving in dialog with tonality germane to the location and century of speakers. Ultimately, though, the net effect of craft is not to create a book to study, but to spin a tale to read for pleasure. Ordinary Devotion is an entertaining book that sticks fast in the mind and heart.
Tackling tough themes
Much of book’s staying power comes from dealing with difficult issues. The vicissitudes of women’s reproductive lives lead the pack. Across the centuries, pregnancy can be dangerous. It can kill or weaken women and result in miscarriage and stillbirth. It occurs at economically and socially inopportune times, requiring hard decisions.
Then and now, pregnancy, its prevention, and its risks are often borne in secret, because shame did and still does attend any deviation from the ideal of the healthy, wanted, and planned pregnancy. Then, as now, reproductive choice colors human life, whether women control fertility by choosing a fourteenth-century cloister or twenty-first century healthcare. Holt-Browning’s book faces these issues squarely and openly, as challenges both women and men must confront.
Ordinary Devotion also grapples with the long-standing limitations of women’s employment. In the fourteenth century, a respectable life-path for a woman like Lady Adela was to have herself sealed off a cell with little more than a peephole for daylight; the mystic, writer, and anchoress Julian of Norwich followed this path. Back then, a mere girl like Elinor could be shut up with the anchoress until one of them died, as has been speculated of the 8-year-old who grew into the polymath St. Hildegard von Bingen.
In the present day, while women aren’t interred alive in churches, they are buried under loads of disrespect and denial of advancement at work. Holt-Browning does a masterful job in her book describing Liz’s struggles as a poorly paid, overworked, and sometimes denigrated adjunct professor. This is a character study that is long overdue in literature, given that today, nearly 70% of all faculty are adjuncts and 60% of them would like a staff teaching position. If anything, the novel might have benefitted from a deeper dive into this issue—especially since, while Liz deals with the uncertainty of her contingent position, her husband Nick is on the university’s tenure-track teaching staff. I wanted to know more about the emotions that might occur when, as Holt-Browning writes, “professional positions were wildly unequal.”
Ordinary and extraordinary
Ordinary Devotion is not an ordinary novel. It has an extraordinary ability to draw us in to lives an age and a continent away. The finely depicted characters Elinor, Lady Adela, and Liz captivate us, then show us the connections between the medieval and the modern. Kristen Holt-Browning has created historical fiction worthy of both those terms, a book of ample history and profoundly original fiction.
Kristen Holt-Browning. Ordinary Devotion. Monkfish Book Publishing, 2024. ISBN: 978-1958972472. Available at all online retailers.
Kristen Holt-Browning is a novelist, poet, and freelance copy editor and proofreader. Her poetry chapbook, The Only Animal Awake in the House, was published by Moonstone Press in 2021. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in several literary journals, including Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hunger Mountain, and Necessary Fiction. She holds a BA from Connecticut College and an MA from University College London. Ordinary Devotion is her first novel.
Dana Delibovi is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her book translations and essays, Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Ávila is being published in 2024. Delibovi is a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee, a 2020 Best American Essays notable essayist, and consulting poetry editor at the literary e-zine Cable Street. She is a past contributor to Slippery Elm.