Mr Wroe's Virgins

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Born in Bradford in 1782, the son of a woolcomber, he was instructed to convert to Judaism by a vision he had during a serious illness in his late thirties. Told with humor, irony and a generosity that embraces even the sinister Wroe, this is a compelling story of astonishing depth, elucidating religious idealism, the beginnings of socialism and the ubiquitous position of women as unpaid laborers. I don't want to spoil the book by giving too much away, but it was a great read, beautifully written and intensely original. When Hannah tells him she has no faith, he not only talks to her openly about his own doubts, but also allows her to attend Owenite meetings in the town. S. Byatt and Margaret Atwood, Jane Rogers has given us novel of ideas that is not so much to be read as to be devoured.

When I had conquered my laughter I placated them, agreeing that the prophet's request was indeed God's answer to our prayers. By what other means could they ever hope to be rid of me, an ill-favoured woman, entrusted into their care by my father on his deathbed, and lacking any other kin in this world? There was a man named John Wroe, a religious leader who won a cult following with his apocalyptic visions.I thought the characterisation of Martha (a boorish girl from a troubled background) was less strong than the portrayal of the other women and I never quite got to grips with her. The way the book is structured into four different narratives allows the women’s characters to develop fully, as over nine months, the story of their lives unfold. He was accepted as Prophet by his Lancashire congregation in 1822 and received from on high the news that Ashton was to be the New Jerusalem.

Rogers, who has four previously published novels, tells her tale in the voices of four of the seven women. The seven (invented) virgins Mr Wroe chooses for himself include a cripple, a badly beaten mute and two under-age sisters who can hardly read. In 1830, as the end of the world approached, the charismatic, hunchbacked prophet of a religious sect settled in Lancashire heeds the biblical injunction and chooses seven virgins ‘for comfort and succour’. She lifts her hand to raise the woman's veil, but as she does so the woman ducks, shielding her head with her arms. Although her moral vision is complex and sometimes dangerous, her novels are accessible - or would be if the reading public knew about them.The narrative of Mr Wroe's Virgins is intricate, but the prose is simple and lucid, packed with the vivid substance of nineteenth-century life and tender with detail: ice shards in the milk, loaves baking in the brick oven, the brimstone oratory of the Prophet's sermons by day and the quick needles pricking muslin in the evening. Yet another had been brutalised as a girl and her story is well written, you become witness to her evolving use of English as she recounts her story. The story itself is not a wholly happy one though, and it made me grateful to be living my modern secular life. I was living in an old mill town, surrounded by relics of the industrial revolution and the evangelical, social and educational movements that sprang up in response to it; a crucible for new heavens and new earths.

I don’t want to ruin the ending, so I’ll reserve any more detail, but such an arrangement can’t last and I kept reading hoping for the women’s emancipation. Based on the true story of John Wroe's reign as prophet of the Christian Israelites in Ashton beginning in 1822, Mr Wroe's Virgins tells the tale of the seven virgins he requested to serve him as housemaids. Voluptuous Leah tries to use her sexuality to manipulate her circumstance, certain that she knows how things work, even in a prophet's house. And yet he tells the naive Joanna the opposite when he interprets one of her dreams to mean that she should allow her body to be used as the receptacle for the Son of God.Most of the locations that are associated with Wroe are long gone, although one of his ‘gatehouses’ does survive in the form of former "Odd Whim" public house in Park Square, Mossley Road, Ashton-under-Lyne, now converted into offices and flats. I certainly do not understand why such a (at the time) highly acclaimed miniseries has been allowed to fade away from memory, receiving no release to DVD. It did form the basis of a TV play so perhaps that is the reason behind the extra dramatic attention given to the particular four women? It’s a successful attempt to put flesh on the bones of these characters, but only to a certain extent.

He becomes increasingly open to her and jokes wearily about one of the church Elders: “He would dispatch us all to hell, if he could, and reign alone himself with God. Pat told me she was getting out of “the women’s ghetto”; she was planning a book about men and war, she was going to beat the boys at their own game. In 1830, as the end of the world approaches, the charismatic, hunchbacked prophet of a religious sect settled in Lancashire heeds the biblical injunction and chooses seven virgins ""for comfort and succor. One is a religious zealot who became an annoying read as she was both manipulative and easily manipulated, it is easy to see how unscrupulous people could get this type of person to commit atrocities in the name of God. But I was broke and my sales were poor, and I was spiky about the literary world, which seemed to me to consist mainly of men, mainly in London.Here, for once, the patriarch is not a big bad wolf to be obeyed or else exterminated, but a man too complicated to make sense of his own contradictions, and so only intermittently powerful. I loved this story and was absorbed until the end, having discovered it recently after listening to the author's interesting audio interview, provided with the course materials for the Open University's Advanced Creative Writing course, A363. Wroe's Virgins, which was a New York Times Notable Book and was dramatized as a BBC television serial, which aired on the Sundance Channel last winter. With both her dreams of social standing gone and her baby son dead of a fever, she takes revenge by "confessing" to Joanna that Wroe had raped her during a missionary trip.