Stevie Davies

	IMPASSIONED CLAY

1	'Don't you hear them? The dead. Speaking. From the pages of books?' asks the heroine of Stevie Davies's Impassioned Clay. Olivia is a historian, passionate about her work, lonely, spiky, longing for a loving relationship with a woman. On official university occasions she "struts about, provocatively", in her "best Oxfam male suit", complete with shirt and tie. In the garden of the house where her Quaker mother is buried, she finds a skeleton dating from the civil war: a woman wearing a scold's bridle. Slowly, painstakingly, using her historian's skills, Olivia reconstructs the woman's life. Her name was Hannah: she and her female lover were Quakers, passionate visionaries who rebelled against the men who wanted to silence them. The novel is eloquent, erudite and, as Olivia uncovers a story that is both alien and a distant mirror of her own life, deeply moving.
	The Sunday Times

2	Since reading Stevie Davies's brilliant and unique study of women and the English Revolution, Unbridled Spirits, the Bookie has developed the strongest of respect for her work. For what characterised that book and what also permeates her new novel, Impassioned Clay, is her unbounded empathy for history and the human beings that it uncovers. That process is at work again as Olivia, the teenage daughter of a quaker mother, digs her mother's grave in the back garden of their centuries-old Cheshire home. She exhumes the bones of a republican woman called Hannah, who was hanged three-and-a-half centuries before. As she grows older and becomes a university teacher and researcher, her passion becomes a search for this woman's life and struggle. Through her scholarship, she discovers a revolutionary and a visionary who was tortured and murdered by the frightened and challenged men who ruled her era. She was condemned to wear the brank —- an instrument of punishment for witches and blasphemers that was clamped to the skull. It was "an iron cage, a stone in weight, with a bit two-inches long, ending in nine iron pins with sharp points," which is rammed into the mouth and stabbed into the victim's tongue, smashing her jaw and teeth in the affixing. Olivia becomes this woman through the unbridled power of her empathy and historical memory. And, in doing so, her own life becomes interpreted and clarified. Hannah is her lucidator, the light which illuminates her own very different and yet very similar reality. For Hannah is a rebel of the spirit, of the world and of the way that people need to live a love. As Olivia tracks down her face, her mind, her writing and her lesbian love for Isabel, a farmworker whom she scoops away from her labours in the fields, her own life's heart and sexuality finds comradeship and clarity. Now, the Bookie thinks, Impassioned Clay is some novel and wonders why it has not found more recognition, for, in excavating history, it also removes the earth from many of our own now-times complexities. Perhaps it digs too deep, loosens too much ground, English ground at that, for current postmodern critical vanities. "Her poor tongue," Olivia keeps repeating, as she remembers "the skull's shattered teeth and her unholy pain seemed to gush into the cavity of my mouth." For it is those unquietened "vehement voices" —- uncompromisingly rebellious, humane and strident, yet also tender and loving that the tongue only forges —- that stay with the reader. Whether it is Isabel's ragging critique in her own Lancashire demotic dialect of the "Shit-God made Arsehole-church," or Hannah's brave refutations of the masculinity of God and the loving belief between both women that they had conceived a child of woman —- it is speech, assaulted and ended by the rusty, spiked prongs of the Stockport brank, that becomes the saviour as well as first witness of history. The voice, thinks the Bookie, the human voice, always subversive, never quiescent, still talking and telling through brave and beautiful tongues like those of Stevie Davies.
	Morning Star

3	This is not simply a historical novel. Its carefully crafted narrative counterpoises women's past lives with those of today, amplifying the emotional sides of passionate female mystics by underscoring the similarities with passions of our own ... this is a beautifully written and elegantly constructed novel.
	Lisa Jardine, The Times

4	Beautifully written, full of atmosphere and emotion. [Davies] conjures up the feeling of history oozing its way up through the layers of time to seep into the present.
	Friend

5	This book is so beautifully written, I've clung to every sentence . . . the utter brilliance of the story is such that I stumble for words simply thinking about it. I can't do this book justice. I can't do this review justice. I'm not even going to try. Just put me out of my misery and buy it.
	The Crack

6	Piercing, elegiac prose. A superior novel.	Metro

7	Resonant and richly textured.	Times Literary Supplement

8	A virtuoso novel.	Daily Express

9	A compelling story, full of dramatic and moving images.	Good Book Guide

10	An intelligent novel that lingers in the mind —- and heart.	Historical Novels Review

11	A strangely compelling narrative, a complex hybrid of 'stream of consciousness' and historical whodunnit... sometimes macabre, often moving, with poignant insight into life, Impassioned Clay is an impressive read.
	Diva