Let Theirs Be Light

A novel

The true story of a woman erased from her own life, and her refusal to vanish.

In 19th‑century Iceland, Matthildur is the wife of a prominent politician. She bears him sixteen children in twenty years. Then, days after the last birth, he casts her off to marry their teenage housemaid. The law leaves her almost nothing, so to stay near her children she becomes a servant in her own former household, at the beck and call of the man who discarded her and the woman who replaced her. History remembered her husband. This novel is hers.

The sea at its heart

Beneath Matthildur’s story runs a voyage. Her father is a sea captain who carries live Icelandic falcons across the North Atlantic to the Danish crown, birds among the most prized creatures of their age, taken from the cliffs of home and borne toward gilded, unfamiliar fates. The falcons are the book’s central image: captured, caged, and carried into a life not of their choosing, as Matthildur is. Yet a caged falcon is not a broken one; its wildness outlasts the crossing. The novel asks what freedom costs, what captivity does to a spirit, and what it takes to survive a crossing into the unknown.

How it is being written

I came to this book the long way. I learned Icelandic and went to the source, working where the story happened. What archives cannot hold is the sea itself, so I go to the water. Let Theirs Be Light is in progress. Notes from the research appear in Field Notes.