On the surface, The Wrecker’s Daughter is a rollicking adventure, featuring a reprobate anti-heroine, Hannah Pendarves, who emerges from an awful family of robber-murderers to work her way to a mostly undeserved redemption. The story has a witty narrative perspective on events that are not laughing matters: this novel’s primary concern is neither romance nor realism. Scratch the surface, and you find a satire in the classic English tradition. It has some of the humor of Roald Dahl; a dash of social commentary in the vein of  W. M. Thackeray; and, undergirding all, a moral concern that hearkens back to Swift. 

Although the setting is 19th-century Cornwall, the post-Christian amorality of Hannah and her apostate community, St. Rose, is strikingly reminiscent of ordinary, respectable people today. The cheerful conflation of easy religiosity, casual brutality and unwitting heresy, along with the total absence of anything that could be described as conscience make the inhabitants of St. Rose more postmodern than Victorian. It’s not until Hannah leaves St. Rose for Falmouth (for nefarious purposes, of course) that she slowly becomes aware that there is such a thing as living for a higher principle than self-interest.

What is really fascinating about Hannah’s trajectory is that it explores the possible spiritual transformation of exactly the sort of people who seem utterly impervious to repentance. When Hannah assumes the role of traitor in the household of a genuinely good man, Francis Keverne, we get to see what principled people look like to those who prey upon them. But for all her wickedness, neither Hannah nor her kindred are completely evil. The Wrecker’s Daughter offers a complex, nuanced analysis of the motives and delusions of people who do very bad things for reasons that, however twisted, are still understandable. 

Hannah does care about the people whom she considers to be her community. And she does have a form of worship that is in effect pagan, but she was trained in this belief from childhood and has never had reason to question it. When Francis Keverne informs her that the Bible verse she has lived by is not found anywhere in Scripture, she begins to come to terms with a terrible realization: the culture that has formed her is completely corrupt. 

Beneath Hannah’s warped outlook and violent behaviors are seeds of self-sacrifice and reverence. Slowly, the good in her begins to wrestle with the evil habits and false teaching that have governed her whole life. As she begins to apprehend that there is a higher truth, she also begins to realize how terrible her own behavior has been. This is a bleak and frightful dawning for anyone who has ever experienced it, and The Wrecker’s Daughter, although fanciful in many respects, is completely realistic at the level of human motive and intention. For Hannah, there is no possibility of escape into romantic wish-fulfillment. Despite or perhaps because of the surface levity, the narrative achieves an impressive feat. It reveals the stark choice between damnation or redemption that resides within behaviors considered normal by one’s social group. In the end, love is the mysterious transforming power that allows for good to triumph over evil, and grace has the final word.