The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox was published by Headline Review in 2006, and it represents O’Farrell at her most controlled and devastating — a novel that explores the systematic disappearance of women whose behavior failed to conform to mid-twentieth-century expectations, told across three timelines that converge with terrible precision.
Iris Lockhart runs a vintage clothing shop in Edinburgh. She receives a call from a hospital: her grandmother’s sister, Esme, has been an inmate of a psychiatric institution for over sixty years. The hospital is closing; Esme needs somewhere to go. Iris didn’t know Esme existed — her grandmother Kitty never mentioned a sister, and no family records acknowledge her.
The novel alternates between Iris’s present (trying to understand who Esme is and why she was hidden), Esme’s past (her 1930s childhood in Edinburgh and India, her adolescent rebellion against propriety, and the events that led to her committal), and Kitty’s fragmentary consciousness (the grandmother, now suffering from dementia, whose memories surface in disconnected flashes that gradually reveal her role in Esme’s imprisonment).
What emerges is not a story of madness but of inconvenience: Esme was not mentally ill but socially unacceptable — too sexual, too intelligent, too unwilling to perform femininity as her family required. Her committal was a family decision, facilitated by a medical system that treated female nonconformity as pathology.
Collecting The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
First edition (Headline Review, London, 2006): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $15–$40
- Signed first edition: $30–$80