Fiction
The Milliner and the Phrenologist
An ambitious and compelling debut novel - a Victorian narrative that taps into the current zeitgeist.
1860s London: a period of discovery, competing ideas and rigid social hierarchy. When Alice Heapy, an unusual and artistic young milliner, daringly sets up her own business, the mother of John Motton, eminent phrenologist, is amongst the first of her bourgeois and eccentric clients. Alice is intrigued by the phrenologist’s belief that he can determine his clients’ character and moral capacity by measuring their heads, whilst Motton is astonished at the power Alice’s poetic hats exert on the lives of his mother and her peculiar friends. But under each other’s exacting and increasingly hostile gaze, Alice and Motton begin to reveal - and, in desperation, attempt to conceal - their own characters.
As Alice and Motton play out the ferocious Victorian tensions between social classes, men and women, science and art, faith and reason - tensions which continue to challenge us - we are drawn into the sensuous imagery and subtle humour of this sharply observed drama, eager to know where it will lead. A highly original and visual novel, brimming with delicious wit, The Milliner and the Phrenologist is a remarkable debut from Kay Syrad.
Available from Cinnamon Press, Amazon and bookshops. See Kay’s BLOG for readers' comments about The Milliner and the Phrenologist.
Kay is currently writing a new novel that investigates pre-verbal experience. She has also completed another novel, about political extremes in the Britain in the early 1930s.