Title: The Wages of Sin Series: Sarah Gilchrist #1
Author: Kaite Welsh
Published: March 7, 2017
Genre(s): Historical Fiction, Mystery/Thriller
Page Count: 290
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Sarah Gilchrist has fled London and a troubled past to join the University of Edinburgh's medical school in 1892, the first year it admits women. She is determined to become a doctor despite the misgivings of her family and society, but Sarah quickly finds plenty of barriers at school itself: professors who refuse to teach their new pupils, male students determined to force out their female counterparts, and—perhaps worst of all—her female peers who will do anything to avoid being associated with a fallen woman.
Desperate for a proper education, Sarah turns to one of the city’s ramshackle charitable hospitals for additional training. The St Giles’ Infirmary for Women ministers to the downtrodden and drunk, the thieves and whores with nowhere else to go. In this environment, alongside a group of smart and tough teachers, Sarah gets quite an education. But when Lucy, one of Sarah’s patients, turns up in the university dissecting room as a battered corpse, Sarah finds herself drawn into a murky underworld of bribery, brothels, and body snatchers.
Painfully aware of just how little separates her own life from that of her former patient’s, Sarah is determined to find out what happened to Lucy and bring those responsible for her death to justice. But as she searches for answers in Edinburgh’s dank alleyways, bawdy houses and fight clubs, Sarah comes closer and closer to uncovering one of Edinburgh’s most lucrative trades, and, in doing so, puts her own life at risk…
Set in 1892 Edinburgh, Kaite Welsh’s debut novel, The Wages of Sin, is an unflinching inspection of life for women in the 19th century—from the highest ranks of society to the lowest. Although perhaps the author’s message gets away from her at times, I nevertheless found this to be an excellent (if often uncomfortable) read.
Perhaps it’s because of how many romance novels I read, but when the Victorian era is mentioned, systemic misogyny is not the first thing that comes to mind. But it should be. This is the period of the Cult of Domesticity, of sending your wives and daughters to asylums, of curing “hysteria” via yanking out the uterus; this is a time when women had no rights, no options, and no safety. Sometimes, rose-tinted novels about plucky bluestockings and dapper gambling den proprietors make me lose sight of these truths.
The protagonist of The Wages of Sin, Sarah Gilchrist, is an ambitious “new woman” with dreams of graduating medical school, but her life is not one of sipping tea and raging with her friends over hypothetical injustices. For her, the injustices are real and relentless (hella content warnings, folks). Welsh is brutal in the way she exposes not only Sarah’s horrific backstory, but the daily plight of women all over Edinburgh. Botched abortions, Magdalene houses for “fallen women,” sexual assaults, harassment, torture masquerading as mental health treatment; financial insecurity. The weight of oppression pushing against the characters is suffocating.
The vehicle by which the author explores this patriarchal hellscape is the tragic death of a pregnant girl Sarah treated at the clinic where she volunteers. The girl ends up on Sarah’s slab in her dissection class, and she quickly sees that it wasn’t just a laudanum overdose. The Wages of Sin is meant to be a mystery novel, but I would argue that it’s really not. Sure, there is a murder, the main character does investigate the dead girl’s background, but the investigation is not the primary thrust of the plot, especially in the beginning.
If the author had decided to focus more on the mystery portions of the plot, I don’t think the story would have been nearly as successful. The twists and turns of the murder plot aren’t terribly good on their own. However, Sarah’s search for answers about the dead girl’s past is an excellent way to expose more horrid things Victorian women were subjected to, and it provides a framework for the author to demonstrate Sarah’s personality and situation.
Obviously, Welsh’s own opinions on historical discrimination of women are very apparent in the text. While I’m 100% sympathetic to the points she makes, I do think that at times (but not always), the messages were a bit too strong and a bit too on the nose. The nice thing about fiction is that, if you’re good at writing, themes and motifs can be readily understood by readers without the author explicitly stating “sexism is bad,” etc. Here, Welsh toed the line pretty well, but her outrage got the best of her in a few spots.
The Wages of Sin is a novel that very grounded in the historical moment it depicts. It’s not a joyless story, but neither is it one that shies away from the darker bits of the past. As a mystery on its own, it may leave a few things to be desired, yet I found that overall, this was a satisfying (if distressing) read.
