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Outlawed by Anna North6/30/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() She discovers one of Shakespeare’s favourite scenes, care-free country folk, decked in flowers, dancing and singing in the presence of their leader, the Kid. Having been abandoned in the darkness Ada pushes through some major scrub before being rescued by the sound of a fiddle. And other people won’t be safe from you” (44). The Mother Superior extends herself in protecting eighteen-year-old women in her charge to caution, “If you go up to Hole in the Wall, you won’t be safe anymore. However, our heroine Ada wants to expand her knowledge of medicine as it applies to women and persuades the Mother Superior to allow her to travel (unsupervised) with a travelling bookseller into the wilds to join the Hole in the Wall Gang. In less serious cases, the usual cliché of banishing a socially isolated woman to a convent follows. Thus, Anna North paints a picture of a society dominated by men. (Historical accuracy is a casualty, a fatality, in this book). Rumour is sufficient for a charge of practising witchcraft, for which the penalty is death by hanging. Failure to produce a child in a reasonable time carries the consequence of divorce and social disfavour. Ada lives under a law that requires young women marry and have children. Outlawed is set in 1894 in an unidentified State of the USA. ![]()
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