The Wonder

“Lib was always shy of introducing the great lady’s name into conversation and loathed the whimsical title that had come to be attached to all those Miss N. had trained, as if they were dolls cast in her heroic mold. ‘Yes, I had the honor of serving under her at Scutari.’”

This is the novel’s first reference to Florence Nightingale, the famous English nurse, and Scutari, the wartime hospital where she worked. Wright’s experience working under Nightingale at Scutari got her the position in Athlone, and is eventually revealed as a source of significant trauma. The above passage contains a simile; Nightingale’s nurses are compared with “dolls cast in [Nightingale’s] heroic mold.” Dolls are placid and inanimate, suggesting that Nightingale’s nurses are obedient and deferential to their training. Over the course of the novel, Wright will break away from this.

“Did they think to buy the endorsement, the combined reputability, of a Sister of Mercy and a Nightingale?”

Both Sister Michael and Wright belong to orders of women known for their service in healthcare: the Sisters of Mercy and the Nightingale nurses, respectively. Wright resents the fact that they have been hired to add legitimacy to Anna’s claims through their reputation, rather than their merits.

“Rosaleen O’Donnell straightened her frame, and her sparse eyelashes fluttered. ‘No false claims, no impostures, will be found in this house, Mrs. Wright. ‘Tis a humble home, but so was the stable.’”

Rosaleen O’Donnell, Anna’s mother, is fervent in her belief that Anna is truly surviving without food. Her reference to the birthplace of Jesus—“the stable”—indicates to Wright that she has delusions of religious grandeur. Her thin eyelashes suggest that the entire O’Donnell family experiences malnutrition.

“‘He can pick anyone to be holy,’ Anna assured her.”

This passage, in which Anna explains her faith in saints, foreshadows the reveal of her belief that fasting will clear her brother’s sins. Wright’s unfamiliarity with and suspicion of the Catholic church prevents her from fully understanding Anna’s belief in the power of saints.

“How could the child bear not just the hunger, but the boredom? The rest of humankind used meals to divide the day, Lib realized—as reward, as entertainment, the chiming of an inner clock. For Anna, during this watch, each day had to pass like one endless moment.”

This passage is indicative of the cultural differences between Wright and Anna, as manifested in their perspectives on food. Wright, who has known food insecurity but never famine, sees food as a part of the social structure. Anna, who was born during the Great Famine, sees fasting as the ultimate sacrifice.

“‘I live on manna from heaven,’ said Anna. As simply as she might have said, I live on my father’s farm.”

Anna claims to be living on manna, a biblical dew-like substance that fed the Israelites while they were wandering in the desert. The claim elevates Anna’s fast from curious to miraculous in the eyes of the faithful. For Wright, however, Anna’s belief is evidence of childish delusion.

“The bad time, Lib assumed, was that terrible failure of the potato ten or fifteen years back. She tried to call up the details. All she could generally remember of old news was a flicker of headlines in grim type.”

Although Wright faced traumatic experiences as a nurse during the Crimean War, she knows little about the Great Famine that traumatized the people of Ireland, and during which Anna was born. Her ignorance of the famine adds distance between her and Anna.

“McBrearty shook his head. ‘As it happens I was still in Gloucestershire then. I inherited this estate only five years ago and couldn’t rent it out, so I thought I’d return and practice here.’”

This passage is indicative of the tension between British and Irish people that is visible throughout the novel. Dr. McBrearty is a member of the Anglo-Irish ruling class: Of Irish descent but raised and educated in England, he was protected from the trauma of the Great Famine. The novel suggests that his return to Ireland is to the detriment of the people of Athlone, who live primarily on his land.

“When she reached the cabin at nine that night she recognized the moaning chorus of the Rosary: Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death, amen.”

In the second chapter of the novel, Wright becomes more familiar with Catholic traditions, such as the prayers the O’Donnell family say daily. Although she is still suspicious of some aspects of Catholic faith, this familiarity helps her to understand and care for Anna more deeply.

“Anna’s body was a blank page that recorded everything that happened to it.”

The above quote is a metaphor, where something is compared to something else without using “like” or “as.” In this case, Anna’s body is compared to “a blank page,” one that becomes a record. Though Anna claims to have gone without food for several months, her body reveals that she has been eating up until recently.

“If the potato blight had been such a long catastrophe, ending only seven years ago, it occurred to Lib that a child now eleven must have been born into hunger. Weaned on it, reared on it; that had to shape a person.”

This passage indicates the novel’s interest in trauma and the body. Lib’s wartime trauma does not make her more understanding of the O’Donnells’ famine-based trauma, and for a long time she does she notice the connection between the famine and Anna’s refusal to eat. In the above quote, hunger becomes personified as an entity, something that one can be “weaned” and “reared” on.

“‘Don’t picture it as an actual fire,’ he urged Anna, ‘so much as the soul’s painful sense of its unworthiness to come into God’s presence, its self-punishment, you see?’”

In this passage, Mr. Thaddeus explains to Anna that purgatory is not a physical place, but rather a way of conceiving the purity necessary to enter heaven. This explanation does not comfort Anna, who is intimately aware of her brother’s sins. It also deeply disturbs Wright, who sees confession as a foreign practice.

“‘You give us all hope. The very thing we need in these depressed times,’ he told her. ‘A beacon shining across these fields. Across the whole benighted island.’”

Here, committee member John Flynn inadvertently confirms Wright’s suspicions that she has been brought to Ireland in order to bring fame to this small town by confirming that Anna has been living for months without food. The committee hopes that the story of Anna will uplift the Irish people after years of trauma. The passage uses a metaphor, comparing Anna to “a beacon.”

“Lib suspended her dislike of the woman for a moment and considered what Rosaleen O’Donnell had been through; what had hardened her. Seven years of dearth and pestilence, as Byrne had put it with a biblical ring. A boy and his little sister, and little or nothing to feed them during the bad time.”

This passage suggests that the experience of raising children through the Great Famine had a traumatic impact on Rosaleen O’Donnell, and that the experience is essential to understanding her character. It also indicates that Byrne makes Wright more empathetic.

“Her stoical character and elevated spirits may obscure the truth, but the lurching walk and strained posture, the chill, distended fingers, the sunken eyes, and above all the sharp-scented breath known as the odor of famine, all testify to her state of malnutrition.”

This excerpt from Byrne’s article about Anna reveals the unique insight he has into Anna’s case simply by virtue of being Irish. His experience with starvation during the Great Famine allows Byrne to immediately see that Anna is dying. This hands-on knowledge is contrasted with Wright’s formal training, which initially makes her neutral in the face of Anna’s hunger.

“Without speculating on what covert devices may have been used to keep Anna O’Donnell alive for four months until the watch commenced on the eighth of August, it may be said—rather, must be said, without equivocation—that the child is now in grave peril, and that her watchers must beware.”

This excerpt from Byrne’s article about Anna is particularly upsetting to Wright. It confirms her greatest fear: that she is complicit in Anna’s rapid decline. In its implicit attribution of Anna’s starvation to the watch, the article echoes Byrne’s youthful declaration that the British engineered the Great Famine. The fact that Wright is English adds extra tension.

“‘My good woman, you overstep your mark. You’ve not been called upon to deduce anything. Though your protectiveness is only natural,’ he added more gently. ‘I suppose the duties of a nurse, especially with a patient so young, must stimulate the dormant maternal capacity. Your own infant didn’t live, I understand?’”

Throughout the novel, Dr. McBrearty is condescending and patronizing to Wright, despite the prestige of her training as a Nightingale and her years of experience as a nurse. This passage is indicative of his misogyny, as he attributes Wright’s genuine and well-founded concerns to a kind of maternal “hysteria.” Here, the narrative reveals that Wright lost an infant. The reader’s likely shock mirrors Wright’s own horror at being reminded of that loss in a professional setting.

“If I were to propose that we abort the watch on the grounds that it’s jeopardizing the child’s health by preventing some secret method of feeding, how would that look? It would be tantamount to a declaration that my old friends the O’Donnells are vile cheats!”

This passage reveals how deeply entrenched the community of Athlone is in the life of Anna O’Donnell. Unlike Wright, Dr. McBrearty has had the privilege of a formal education and has, as Byrne notes, taken the Hippocratic oath to do no harm to his patients. McBrearty indicates that he’s breaking that oath in order to keep peace with the O’Donnells and avoid damaging the family’s reputation.

“Lib reminded herself that she was quite prepared to lose this job. Hadn’t William Byrne been cashiered at sixteen for the seditious truths he’d told about his famished countrymen? That had probably been the making of the man. Not so much the loss itself as his surviving it, realizing that it was possible to fail and start again.”

In Chapter 4, Wright begins to accept her growing feelings for Byrne. This passage suggests his influence not only on her understanding of Anna’s case, but on her reasoning and patterns of thinking. The final sentence could equally apply to Wright’s new life as a nurse after the loss of her husband. It is another acknowledgment of their growing intimacy and shared traits.

“Lib pictured the wide famine grave in the churchyard. ‘Hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions of your compatriots died when you were a tiny child. That means it’s your sacred task to keep going. To keep breathing, to eat like the rest of us, to do the daily work of living.’”

At the beginning of the novel, Wright’s ignorance of the Great Famine separates her from the people of Athlone and prevents her from fully understanding the significance of Anna’s fast. These lines from the final chapter suggest that she has gained a unique perspective on the famine. For Wright, the Famine is evidence that life is precious; for the committee, Anna is evidence that humans can overcome hunger.

“Lib grasped it now: This whole earth was the land of exile. Every interest, every satisfaction life could offer, was scorned as a snare for the soul bent on hurrying to heaven.”

The realization that the O’Donnells’ Catholic faith sees life on earth as exile from heaven is essential to Wright’s eventual rescue of Anna. Although Wright has experienced the trauma of war, she sees life as a gift. Anna and the O’Donnells, on the other hand, view life as a series of temptations that need to be resisted.

“There must have been something sour in Lib’s milk, because the baby had turned away or spat it out, and what little she got down had made her dwindle as if it were the opposite of food, a magical shrinking potion.”

The revelation that Wright’s child died is essential to understanding her character and her motivations for stealing Anna away from her parents. Although she doesn’t admit it, her time with Anna clearly evokes painful memories of watching her own child starve to death and fade away. The novel suggests that it is possible to turn this type of traumatic loss into a new beginning.

“The priest spoke over her. ‘I’ve been telling the poor girl for months that her sins are forgiven, and besides, we should speak nothing but good of the dead.’”

The novel suggests that Anna has been failed by multiple adults in her life, including her parents and her parish priest, Father Thaddeus. In this passage, the priest suggests that Anna is responsible for her sexual assault, and that she was wrong to report it after her brother’s death.