THE VANISHING ACT OF ESME LENNOX
by Maggie O’Farrell

Cover Summary
Edinburgh in the 1930s. The Lennox family is having trouble with its youngest daughter. Esme is outspoken, unconventional, and repeatedly embarrasses them in polite society. Something will have to be done.
Years later, a young woman named Iris Lockhart receives a letter informing her that she has a great-aunt in a psychiatric ward who is about to be released.
Iris has never heard of Esme Lennox and the one person who should know more, her grandmother Kitty, seems unable to answer Iris’ questions. What could Esme have done to warrant a lifetime in an institution? And how is it possible for a person to be so completely erased from a family’s history?
Reading The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
After reading The Marriage Portrait by Maggie (can I call you Maggie?), I’ve made it my bookworm’s mission to get my hands on all her books. So far, Hamnet was quite disappointing and this one was tons better, but still didn’t match up to the all time fav – maybe because that one was so deeply steeped in the Renaissance and I feel like a piece of my own soul was carved by Michelangelo’s (probably assistant’s) hands during that time.
This was a fast read, nice little break from the heavier stuff, of course her writing is absolutely lush time and time again. Also, loony bins, Victorian children, little seaside towns – always my jam.


What I loved
The creativity behind the story
It feels like Maggie took all my favourite dark academia elements like asylums, illegitimately conceived children ripped from their mother’s arms, unfeeling parents and old houses and twisted them into a beautiful creative story that comes full circle in the end! I loved Esme’s story from being the dark sheep of the family, an unruly child, to her being locked up in a mental hospital for 61 years and some months and days, to her experiencing life outside the asylum with Iris once the place decided to close down. I love how photos, places and smells triggered memories that helped her piece her riveting history together.
Snatches of a terrifying real history
With the unfolding of Esme’s story, we get peaks into how dreadful life had been for Victorian women. How Esme was denied the education she so wanted, steered forcefully into marriage, raped by the only person she somewhat wanted a life with, and so easily thrown into the terrible mental health system with just a father’s signature. I quite like reading about social injustices throughout history and the Victorian era is a bottomless pit of such twisted occurances made common.
“and when I first saw him I thought I might dissolve, like sugar in water.”
What I wasn’t too keen about
A bit slow moving at times
When Esme is finally released from the asylum and reluctantly adopted by Iris, she begins to experience moments she had been denied for so long – like taking her time to chew her food! While it was nice at first to see her truly enjoying them, it did drag on a bit at times when she fell into lengthy nostalgia and paralysis during these moments.
Non-linear storytelling
I’m split on this one. I quite liked the back and forth between Esme’s life as a child and her freedom in the present, but when her sister kitty’s dementic ramblings were introduced, I wasn’t so keen. I think they could have been shorter and more relevant at times.

All in all…

This was a powerful and heartbreaking story, and it was woven in such a creative manner so as to come full circle at the very end, which I love (hate cliffhangers). This author is wildly inventive and I’m forever in awe of her imaginative spirit and penchance for interlacing historical social reality into her stories, and very accurately so. I’m definitely on the lookout for her other books to explore what else dwells in her unhibited mind and heart.