The Lie Tree

A Brave Girl

Frances Hardinge’s Costa Award-winning novel, The Lie Tree is set in the 19th century, when women were not treated as the intellectual equal of men. Faith, the courageous heroine of the novel, is a fourteen-year-old who bristles every time she is talked down to as silly little girl.

She is the daughter of Reverend Sunderly, a natural scientist, who leaves England under a cloud of disgrace, accused of having lied about some important fossil finds. His family—sly and shallow wife Myrtle, son Howard, brother-in-law Miles and Faith --make the journey to a place called Vane, where an excavation is on. Faith wants to be a natural scientist like her father, but is told by him, “A girl cannot be brave, or clever, or skilled as a boy can.” And her coquettish mother tells her,  “Women find themselves on battlefields just as men do. We are given no weapons, and cannot be seen to fight. But fight we must, or perish.”

 The family is treated shoddily in the small, gossipy, class conscious and mean-spirited town, but when the Reverend is found dead, Faith has to chase the truth. In a harrowing scene, the townsfolk refuse to bury her father, because he allegedly committed suicide and cannot be buried on consecrated ground.  Only Faith suspects he was murdered, but who would believe a girl, unless she can produce proof. And everything that happens to the family is somehow connected to a plant her father concealed before he died.

In spite of the multi-layered and uncomfortable ‘ladylike’ garments of the time, Faith runs, rows and climbs about like a man, and proves that restrictive social convention cannot stop a girl with brains and courage. A book that would inspire and entertain young readers as well as adults.

The Lie Tree

By Francis Hardinge

Published by: Macmillan

Pages: 416