Introduction_to_Year_of_Wonders

Year of Wonders, A Novel of the Plague is the story of one woman’s journey through the year of the Plague, 1665-66. The novel addresses a number of complex issues and perhaps raises more questions than it answers. Brooks explores a full range of human experiences and qualities – including our frailties, folly, wickedness and our boundless compassion and humanity. The most basic human emotion, fear, and our response to trauma and the unknown, are also examined by Brooks. The novel looks at aspects of rebirth, regeneration and renewal. Seventeenth century Britain, the time of the Restoration, was an era of significant gains in scientific knowledge, particularly in medicine. King Charles II was a patron of the sciences and helped found the Royal Society, a scientific association. One debate that transcends the novel concerns questions about the forces of Nature in opposition to the will of God. The story of Year of Wonders is a fictional tale based on an historical event. The Derbyshire village of Eyam is known as the Plague Village. In August 1665, the plague is thought to have arrived in Eyam in a sealed package of material. The package had arrived from London, where plague had been ravaging the city since April 1665. Ultimately, it would kill 100,000 people, or 20% of the population in London. The rector of Eyam instituted a number of measures to contain and control the spread of the disease. These included having families bury their own dead, moving Church services outdoors, and quarantining the village. In sixteen months, some 250 people died of the plague in Eyam. Only 83 people in the village survived. In Brooks’ fictional account of this event, Anna Frith, an eighteen-year old widow is an invaluable narrator in the context of the novel. Anna is the heroine and protagonist of the story. Her integrity as narrator is established at the outset. Her position as servant at the rectory and part-time helper at Bradford Hall along with the fact that she is landlady for the village’s first plague victim, George Viccars, allows us to be privy to observations and information that are crucial to advancing the plot. Anna’s eighteen-month journey through the trauma and tragedy cut by the plague becomes our journey. We obtain a first-hand point of view of the life-changing decisions that are made which impact on all the inhabitants of the village: the decision to quarantine the village; the choice made by the Bradfords to abandon the village and to turn their servants out on to the street; the closing of the Church; the ‘Great Burning’; the Thanksgiving service; the decisions forced upon Anna to leave the village, then to set sail from Liverpool. One of the only decisions she makes on her own volition is to disembark from the ship in Oran.