The Doctor’s Daughter

The wood-stove purrs beside a neatly furnished cradle, and baby Amey Hampden sleeps beneath a promise of comfort and happiness. But the future, her narrator hints, may have other plans.

Set in mid-Victorian England, The Doctor’s Daughter begins with an ordinary birth that prompts extraordinary questions about how a life is shaped. Amey’s mother dies when she is only days old; before her third birthday, her father has married again. Though her needs are met and she has a governess, the tenderness she longs for is missing, and she grows up feeling alone among the people around her. Looking back, Amey asks readers to consider how childhood, circumstance and the care—or neglect—of others shape a person. What lay behind the gulf between the happy beginning and the lonely child Amey became?

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