Book Review//The Love Child by Edith Olivier

When Agatha Bodenham’s mother dies Agatha is alone and lonely. She is reminded of another time in her life when she felt the same way. When Agatha was fourteen her governess found out about her imaginary friend, Clarissa, and “the caustic drops of Miss Marks’ common sense fell like weed killer upon the one blossom of Agatha’s imagination.” Clarissa was put aside and forgotten. But Agatha remembers her now.

And now, after eighteen years, Agatha felt once more the same desolation. She felt more moved than she had been at her mother’s funeral. There arose in her a spirit of rebellion, a sense of injustice. How dared Miss Marks play the part of a Moloch, and demand from her the sacrifice of her own child? For Clarissa had been alive–more alive to Agatha than any of the real people who had moved about, around her. The creation of Clarissa was the fruit of the one active movement of Agatha’s mind. Clarissa had taken shape. She had possessed not only a name, but a personality of her own. She had responded to Agatha’s cry for companionship with what had seemed to be a real living voice, and when she had been shamefacedly huddled away, to escape from the satire of Miss Marks, Agatha’s mind had become misty and vague, and had grown more so year by year. And as the old memory came back, it seemed to Agatha that in losing Clarissa, she had not only lost a real playmate, but she had lost the only being who had ever awoken her own personality, and made it responsive–she had lost something without which she had grown as futile as a racket idly striking the air, against no ball.

Agatha imagines Clarissa into existence again; a small, elf-like child who dances in and out of reality and brings joy back into Agatha’s life. At first, Agatha is the only one who can see her and she comes and goes unpredictably but, slowly, she becomes more real. Agatha realizes she has to explain the sudden appearance of a child in her life and announces that she is adopting a distant relative. All seems fine until a police officer visits her and asks for documentation of Clarissa’s previous place of residence. This is documentation Agatha can’t provide. What is she going to do?

Suddenly she spoke.

“She is a love-child. She is my own.”

And when she had said this, she began to cry.

“A love-child.” The phrase had surged up from her inner consciousness, and she spoke it without realizing what it implied. It just did express what Clarissa truly was to her–the creation of the love of all her being. It was the truth, and in the face of the truth she knew that no one could take the child away. She had saved her.

Agatha and Clarissa are happy together living a quiet life with only a fortnight in Brighton once a year as excitement. They talk and play games full of imagination. The world around them accepts Clarissa and Agatha lives in a breathless state of possessive happiness. She is the sun around which Clarissa revolves but, as foreshadowed by a game they played, what will happen when Clarissa is attracted by someone else?

This is an odd little book and to be honest, I am not completely sure what I think of it. It has a sad and desperate feel to it at times and I laid the book aside feeling a bit sad and desperate myself. So many people are lonely and miserable as Agatha was. Maybe they don’t conjure up a fantasy child but they sometimes do imagine people around them to be the people they want them to be. They frantically try to hold onto someone and, in the end, they lose them. But for all its sadness, this was a book with moments of joy. Reading it is a bit like reading a fairy tale. Just as a fairy tale mixes the light and the dark so The Love Child does the same. And, just as a fairy tale makes you believe that straw can be spun into gold and a frog can be a prince, Olivier makes you believe that an imaginary friend can be willed into existence with all the pain, loss, and joy that entails.

My thanks to the British Library for the review copy of this book.