Readers familiar with the contemporary Dublin setting of Emma Donoghue's previous fiction may be initially disconcerted by the 18th-century turn of her latest novel. In fact, the retreat to the past is very much in keeping with her academic interests in this period, and Slammerkin is as much a product of historical research as of original creativity.
The story, tracked down though newspaper reports, is of a young girl called Mary Saunders who was hanged in 1764 for the murder of her employer. From the sparse details surrounding the case, including a contemporaneous broadsheet report that Saunders was motivated by her lust for "fine clothes", Donoghue builds up her protagonist's background, character and rationale until it is a fully-fleshed, deeply engaging young woman whose life ends violently on the gallows outside Monmouth Gaol.
Despite its evident difficulties, one suspects that Donoghue found this a deeply satisfying novel to write. She seems comfortable with the parameters of historical romance and the narrative neither strains under the weight of authenticating detail nor lurches into Cookson territory. Her landscapes are brilliantly drawn, particularly in the first half of the book when the squalid gaiety of Mary's life as a prostitute evokes, through a breathless sequence of sexual transactions - "an Irish brickie in Marylebone, a one-legged sailor back from the French wars, a Huguenot silkweaver in Spitalfields" - an exotic tart's cartography of 18th-century London.
There is a sustained relish, too, for the particulars of fabric and fashion in the period. The book's title, Slammerkin, refers to both a loose woman and a loose-fitting gown, and from this jeu de mot Donoghue draws out an emphasis on dress as a subject for constant interrogation, its design so frequently treading a thin line between modesty and harlotry. The clothing theme also provides a surprisingly rich vein of language, as Mary, in her reformed life as seamstress, learns the difference in cut between a casaquin and a caraco, a pentelair and a palatine, a mantalet and a cardinal.
This is a thoroughly enjoyable novel, which proves once again the immense capability of its author. True, the pace flags a little in the second half, but the material retains its intensity to the end. Mary Saunders is no Moll Flanders, and Emma Donoghue has no great moral point to make, but her dramatic invention of a short, brutish life, valiantly lived, is resourceful, poignant and expressive.
Eve Patten lectures in English at Trinity College, Dublin