Exclusive interview with author Julia Gregson and a review of her novel about a British midwife in India after Independence
Rating: 3 Stars
By Gabrielle Pantera
“I think of midwifery as being one of the most powerful and the frightening jobs you could possibly do,” says Monsoon Summer author Julia Gregson. “You’re meeting a woman at one of the most vulnerable moments. Such hope, such joy when things go smoothly. Such devastation and distress if you get it wrong. The Countess of Dufferin’s fund, set up in 1885 and funded by Queen Victoria, sent out teams of trained English midwives to India to work with the Indian dais, -otherwise know as TBAs, Traditional Birth Assistants. So many ways of getting it wrong, particularly when I decided to set my book in 1948, a year after Indian Independence, when Indians would be particularly ill-disposed towards the British.”
It’s 1947. Kit is a nurse who wants to become a midwife. She’s told there’s an opportunity in India to work with the charity cases in the maternity home there. She falls in love with Anto, an Indian doctor finishing his studies in Oxford. They marry and move to India where Kit has to deal with prejudice against a mixed marriage. Her own family and the people in her new neighborhood treat her as an outsider.
Gregson’s descriptions are evocative of the sounds, sights and smells of India. If you’ve ever wondered about life in India after independence, this is a great insight into that world. A turbulent time for the country and the women who live there. Kit is starry-eyed about her recent marriage and her new job but she’s come from a completely different world than the one she’s about to embrace and that her marriage makes her an outcast. That she’s British and a working woman affects how people treat her. The story is gritty at times and reveals an often harsh life.
“I’ve been obsessed with India since I was a small child,” says Gregson. “So when I sat next to this English woman at a dinner party in London and she told me she had married an Indian doctor and now lived in a small village in Northern India, my ears pricked up. Her story was this… She’d fallen in love with an Indian doctor while they were both students at Cambridge. He was handsome, irreverent, drank, smoked and they’d quickly become lovers, and a few months later, married. In India, she ate mostly with the women in his extended family, and was disliked and bullied by her mother-in-law. She was expected to treat her husband as a kind of God.”
On a research trip to South India, Gregson stayed in Fort Cochin at the hotel where Anto and Kit in the book stay on their first day. She visited Homestay, where she stayed with a Nasrani family in a beautiful house on the backwater. “They were amazingly kind and helpful to me,” says Gregson. “Showed me how to eat and prepare their food, how to tie a sari, how they did their hair, how they washed, when they prayed…all the intimate details that make a story come alive..”
Monsoon Summer is Gregson’s fourth novel. Her first, Band of Angels, is set in Wales and Turkey. The second, East of the Sun, in England and India. The third, Jasmine Nights, in Cardiff, Cairo and Turkey.
Gregson has many published short stories. Her first, Apple Blossom Time, won the Ryman’s Literary Review Award. Band of Angels was the runner up for the Waverton Award. East of the Sun won Romantic Novel of the Year and the Prince Maurice Prize with a panel of French and English judges that included Sebastian Faulks, Emma Freud, and Tim Lott.
Gregson is currently writing a book set in London, Paris, New York and Los Vegas. “I’m reading like crazy at the moment, and planning a trip to the Folies Bergère in Paris,” she says.
Grego lives in the small village of Whitebrook, on the border of England and Wales. She was born in London.
Monsoon Summer: A Novel by Julia Gregsonn. Hardcover: 464 pages, Publisher: Touchstone (August 9, 2016), Language: English. ISBN-13: 978-1476725260 $25.99.
