Daughters of Empire by Jane Satterfield

“Somehow,” Jane Satterfied had hoped, standing in Brontes’ Yorkshire, “this landscape would reveal the pathway out of the confinements of my life.” The irony of searching for liberation on the doorstep of one of the most confined of literary sisterhoods is not lost in the essays and prose poems of Daughters of Exile: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond (2009, Demeter Press). From 1994 to 1995 Satterfield spent a year in Staffordshire, England, while her husband fulfilled a Fulbright teaching exchange. It was, in one sense, a home-coming, because Satterfield was born in England and has an English mother. But home-comings are rarely easy, and while her marriage crumbled and she struggled to find a creative niche on the dingy periphery of the M6 motorway, she, to use the British term, fell pregnant, and fell, fell, flailing into the terrifying vortex of new motherhood. Daughters of Empire describes a world suddenly marbled by vertigo, where the terra is no longer firma, where one’s body is a foreign country, where sensual and creative energies are smothered, constricted, then transformed.