It is reasonable to view this extraordinary sacrifice as a public service, as the inhabitants of Eyam thus kept the contagion within their village when they could so easily have panicked and, in fleeing the scene of death, taken the infection all over rural England. Instead, they stayed put and nursed each other until death did them part. For reasons we will never know for sure, but which played fiercely on the writer’s imagination, the people of Eyam took a vow not to run from their village in the hope of saving themselves. The skeleton of her novel comes from history, from a mysterious and unpredicted outbreak of the plague in Eyam. In Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks eerily captures every aspect of life during the plague: the gruesomely painful death, the speed with which the disease spread and the superstitions surrounding it, which rivaled the plague itself for horror.īrooks takes as her inspiration the town of Eyam, a real-life village in England’s Derbyshire countryside. No epidemic has equaled the devastation of the Bubonic Plague, which decimated between one-third and three-quarters of Europe’s population in the Middle Ages and continued to flare up in destructive pockets for centuries after.
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