A Romantic Historical Tale Cuts to the Bone
The Phoenix Bride (Penguin Random House, $18.00) is a second historical novel from Natasha Siegel, and it cuts to the bone with its exploration of the ways in which love can both heal a person’s heart and harm us more than any toxic cure.
Cecilia is a widow in 17th-century London whose husband, Will, died of the plague after a visit to London. Now, Cecilia is both bereft and trapped in the very house where her husband likely contracted the illness which killed him. Her sister, Margaret, is insistent on curing her sister’s melancholy, which has left her unable to eat, to enjoy life—and most importantly, unable to marry again. As a last, desperate ploy, Margaret employs David Mendes, a Jewish physician who visits Cecilia to diagnose her illness.
The physician prescribes something radical—”freedom, in as large a dose as you can manage.” He orders his patient to live despite her grief, even as she protests that physicians cannot cure loss. But in following David’s plea, Cecilia finds herself growing around the shape her grief has twisted her into, as if the hope that David offered with his presence and his entreaty provides the trellis for her new self to grow on. She begins to explore London, and with that, finds her way into a life in which she moves past her loss. Venturing into the city, Cecilia blossoms as she absorbs the city’s life and vitality. London caused her grief, but London makes her bold.
David, for his part, spends the novel grappling not only with his growing attraction to Cecilia, but also with his Jewishness. Raised in Portugal, he grew up as a converso, hiding his heritage and faith. Now in London, where he is free to practice openly, he remarks that “the fear remains.” Since the death of the man he loved silently, David has been a shell of himself—until he meets Cecilia. She awakens the part of him that he thought died with Manuel, and David begins to wonder if it’s possible for him to ever shed the fear he has of being hidden, quiet, and safe. He protests that having grown up wearing a mask, he finds he cannot take it off—but he realizes that he must, if he is to make a life with Cecilia.
Through the novel, David finds ways of touching his Jewishness, even if it isn’t in the way his community recognizes. In struggling with his faith and his feelings towards God, he engages in the very Jewish act of questioning. And he eventually manages to move past the way he blames himself for his failure to save those he loved—because if he condemns himself for their loss, he condemns Cecilia for her losses too. The culmination of the book is both personal and sweeping, juxtaposing the way two people live through a thousand small tragedies with the way that a whole city of people grapples with catastrophe and begins to rebuild.
The book immerses the reader in both the social customs and the sights and smells of its London and also tenderly explores queerness, social class, family relationships, gender divides, the medicalization of grief, and antisemitism through an intimate lens. Though sumptuous in its descriptions of 1665 England, it delivers a thought-provoking story with echoes that resonate today.
As David says, “we could never feel something as powerful as love or hatred without the aid of every organ available to us.” The Phoenix Bride forces you to sit with both the love and the loss in its narrative. The duality is curative and transformative, the best medicine a reader could ask for.
laura samotin is the author of the Jewish historical fantasy novel The Sins on Their Bones.