Review: All Her Lives, by Ingrid Horrocks

Reading Ingrid Horrocks’ short-story collection (and first work of fiction) All Her Lives (Te Herenga Waka University Press) is like slowly rotating a semi-opaque jewel: each facet polished on its own, but sometimes, through a trick of the light, you can see beyond to the mesmerising whole. 

The nine stories follow generations of women between 1795 and ‘now,’ each set against a political or social crisis of the moment, from returning to fractured normalcy after World War I (Evie on Branch), growing up in a garden bounding the nascent Plunket Society (Marvellous Instruments), Auckland’s anti-nuclear movement in 1981 (The End of the Fair) or the consequences on one fractured family trying to thrive in New Zealand’s housing crisis (Concrete Box). 

As you progress through the book characters reappear unexpectedly – I was tempted to sketch up a 'family tree' just to keep track of the relationships – lending additional significance to the title. Each woman isn’t the same, of course, but the overall effect is that were they born in another time or place, they could be. 

‘To consider the girl, her thin arms and small hands as she thanked her and took her leave, was to become herself again, a return to that which she was meant to be part of,’ a fictionalised version of writer and philosopher Mary Wollenstonecraft thinks in The Silver Ship. It’s not Horrocks’ first exploration of Wollstonecraft’s impact on women writers and later feminism: she previously used the philosopher’s travel writings as the starting point for a literary history titled Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784-1814. Wollenstonecraft, her work, and that of her well-known daughter – Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein – recur across the collection.

Horrocks’ characters have a self-aware physicality to them, whether they are at home in their bodies or not. Visuals of pregnancy, the visceral animal qualities of birth and its aftermath, and the body as an imperfect vessel for life abound. So does the impact of one’s life environment, as Horrocks interrogates the outdated assumption and relevance of ‘nature versus nurture.’ 

In Murmuration, for example, Madeleine makes her first international flight in decades to meet her son, Daniel, who has been imprisoned for a climate activist stunt. It forces her to confront whether her emotional and physical distance caused their relationship to warp, perhaps irreparably. Madeleine mourns the loss of their original parent-child bond: ‘She’d felt like a fucking god when he was born: she was a maker of men, body and bone of all sexes, taking up her bloody child, the being that would be hers for always, to shape, to love and to cherish. Something like that. She had made him.’  Is it her fault that Daniel is imprisoned? Or is it the fault of the world collapsing around him?

All Her Lives comes hot on the heels of another feminist short-story collection, Surplus Women by journalist Michelle Duff, which also explores women across time and place. Along with Barbara Else’s The Pets We Have Killed (Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2024) and Kirsty Gunn’s Pretty Ugly (Otago University Press, 2024), these authors show challenging, complex women seizing their moment. 

To focus on the recent two from Te Herenga Waka, both Duff and Horrocks take a semi-detached, impersonal approach in their writing. It allows them to explore challenging themes through individual, detailed ‘literary dioramas.’ But given both All Her Lives and Surplus Women feature recurring characters, I do wonder how they would have functioned as novels instead, paring back some of the weaker stories to focus on the intergenerational consequences through fewer, stronger voices, a la Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. Taken together, the stories in All Her Lives give women the space to be messy, ambitious, hopeful, afraid – to want for the things already in their grasp, and for things beyond what society expects of them.