Title: Her Quiet Revolution: A Novel of Martha Hughes Cannon: Frontier Doctor and First State Senator
Author: Marianne Monson
Publisher: Shadow Mountain
Genre: Historical Fiction
Year published: 2020
Pages: 400
Binding: Cloth
Isbn: 978-1629726090
Price: $24.99
Reviewed by Liz Busby
Historical fiction can be a difficult challenge to get right, especially when the characters in a book are real people. The author has a strong desire to portray events as they actually happened, without adding embellishment. However, given the paucity of details for all but the most prolific of journal keepers in earlier times, the need to create a coherent story requires the author to fill in the cracks.
Such was the problem that Marianne Monson faced in creating her book Her Quiet Revolution: A Novel of Martha Hughes Cannon: Frontier Doctor and First State Senator. The titular character, Marth Hughes Cannon or “Mattie”, had ordered all of her letters destroyed upon her death, leaving Monson to piece together her life from the public record. As she explains in a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNajLNNML7Q), she had to rely on magazine accounts of current events, as well as guesses based on known history, to reconstruct the life of this fascinating woman.
It’s apparent to the reader that Monson has done her research. The last 30 or so pages contain detailed notes on the sources for the events of each chapter. The book contains portrayals of early LDS female healing and confinement rituals as well as portions of a sermon by Brigham Young. Sometimes when reading historical novels, I’m distracted by wondering if the events really happened, but I felt absolutely in good hands with this book from the beginning. Mattie’s life was absolutely fascinating; I definitely think more people should learn about her life.
The difficulty of this book lay on the storytelling side. While the facts of the story are compelling, the way they are told is often lacking. For the first two parts of the book (comprising some 120 pages), I had difficulty connecting with the book. The chapters read like a checklist of historical facts to include and often ended just as I was becoming engrossed with the characters and setting. Then the next chapter was in a completely different location with none of the same characters. There’s a lack of a focused perspective, with the author hopping into different characters’ heads in a way that doesn’t feel purposeful.
The second part of the book whisks Mattie through medical school in three chapters. We barely see a character in two different scenes before he proposes to Mattie at the end of their school days. I was as surprised as the protagonist: I had absolutely no hint that this character would be important and knew nothing about him to tell me whether I wanted Mattie to say yes or no. It felt as though Monson was so worried about being factual that she hesitated to develop the characters’ lives into a real story. These early chapters dragged, and I struggled to get through them because nothing mattered from one chapter to the next.
But then part three-hit and I found what this book was really about: polygamy, specifically Mattie’s experience being a plural wife after polygamy had been made illegal. The author pulls you right along with Mattie as she falls in love with Angus Cannon, brushing off the fact that he’s a polygamist just as a lovestruck teenager might shrug at their parents’ worries that their boyfriend has a criminal record. She chooses to marry him in secret, in spite of the federal agents swarming Salt Lake tracking down polygamists. Mattie the lovestruck young woman with a lack of judgement was the first believable moment in the book. The consequences of her decision hit the reader in the face in the most compelling way. I found myself rushing through the chapters where she is on the run from federal agents like the pages were going to disappear if I didn’t read fast enough. Monson paints a believably human portrait of why Mattie did what she did, even though she wasn’t a strong believer in polygamy.
The balance of the book is consumed with what she had to give up as a result and how her feelings about her polygamous marriage changed and changed again. Mattie’s exile in England and then Wales reads like a bit of a digression, but things heat up again when she returns to Utah after the manifest has nullified her marriage. She is invited to run for state senator and accepts before she realizes that her (former?) husband has accepted a nomination from the opposite party. I wish the hijinks had been dragged out a little more like the sitcom this situation seems to invite, but it’s a perfectly lovely section of the book. The power dynamics between Mattie and Angus are interesting, complicated further by the lack of clarity in their relationship. Mattie goes on to have two more children, though Angus remains officially married to only his first wife. Her final pregnancy knocks her out of the running for a federal Congressional seat.
Granted that I have limited experience with polygamy novels, but I would call this most believable portrayal of the tail end of Mormon polygamy I have read. I enjoyed all the complications and difficulties Mattie faced. Marianne Monson brought up so many things I had never considered about the realities of ending polygamy in the early church. Though the writing in the novel is uneven, I will recommend this book to anyone who wants to really understand why the women of Utah did what they did. Martha Hughes Cannon is a fascinating historical figure that I’m excited to learn more about, and Monson’s novel is a great place to start.