Heather Marshall’s Liberty Street is one of those dual timeline historical fiction novels that I love. It also taught me something about my own country’s dark history in its treatment of women. Not really a win, but it is still interesting.

In 1961, Emily is a twenty-four-year-old assistant at Chatelaine magazine. She has no interest in becoming a wife and mother; she wants to be a famous reporter who covers controversial subjects. One day she receives a letter written by an inmate at Mercer Women’s Prison (located in Toronto and based on the real-life Andrew Mercer Reformatory for Women) alleging abuse at the prison. As Emily begins investigating the prison, she learns about Ontario’s Female Refuges Act, an actual provincial statute that was in effect from 1913 until 1964 that allowed for the arrest and imprisonment of women aged 16 to 35 for being “incorrigible”. Shocking, but also not really shocking. Emily sees an opportunity to launch her career as a journalist by pulling a Nellie Bly and getting herself incarcerated at Mercer so that she can investigate the allegations in the inmate’s letter.

Emily is warned by her father, who helps get her sent to prison for being “incorrigible”, and by her editor to only observe what happens at Mercer and to not do anything to get her prison sentence extended. Of course, Emily does not only observe. She is subjected to some horrifying treatment by the prison doctor, a sadistic woman who seems to get pleasure out of torturing the inmates, and she learns that the doctor is experimenting on the inmates for money. Emily needs to get evidence if she wants to expose the whole thing and let me tell you my anxiety was not having a good time with this. I guess I am not a brave person, or a stupid one, because all I could think about was Emily is going to piss the doctor off and the doctor is going to say she’s unfit to be released and keep her at Mercer indefinitely, and no scoop is worth the possibility of having one’s lady parts experimented on for the rest of your life.

The second timeline of the novel is set in 1996 when a detective named Rachel is tasked with investigating an unknown body found in an unmarked grave in a cemetery. The body is female and suspected to be from the 1960s, and the coffin is traced back to Mercer Women’s Prison. Is it Emily’s body that was buried in an unmark grave? I tore through this novel to find out, but I have to admit to being disappointed with the mystery aspect of this novel because not much of Rachel’s narrative is spent investigating the identity of the body (I guess because the investigation ends up being really easy for Rachel). Instead, Rachel’s narrative is focused on her fractured relationship with her mentally unstable mother. There is a hint of tragedy in Rachel’s past involving her grandmother, who raised her, and her mother that is easy to figure out once you realize how Rachel and Emily’s narratives tie together thematically.

Liberty Street is about the stigmatization of mental health issues, and in particular the lack of compassion and understanding for women’s mental health, especially postpartum mental health, and the use of women’s mental health issues as an excuse to incarcerate them. I found Liberty Street to be a compelling read, but honestly, as uncomfortable as certain parts of the novel made me feel, nothing about it surprised me. I still highly recommend this novel if you like historical fiction.