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Lilli de Jong
Cover of Lilli de Jong
Lilli de Jong
A Novel
Borrow Borrow
“A powerful, authentic voice for a generation of women whose struggles were erased from history—a heart-smashing debut that completely satisfies.”
—Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
A young woman finds the most powerful love of her life when she gives birth at an institution for unwed mothers in 1883 Philadelphia. She is told she must give up her daughter to avoid lifelong poverty and shame. But she chooses to keep her.
 
Pregnant, left behind by her lover, and banished from her Quaker home and teaching position, Lilli de Jong enters a home for wronged women to deliver her child. She is stunned at how much her infant needs her and at how quickly their bond overtakes her heart. Mothers in her position face disabling prejudice, which is why most give up their newborns. But Lilli can’t accept such an outcome. Instead, she braves moral condemnation and financial ruin in a quest to keep herself and her baby alive.
 
Confiding their story to her diary as it unfolds, Lilli takes readers from an impoverished charity to a wealthy family's home to the streets of a burgeoning American city. Drawing on rich history, Lilli de Jong is both an intimate portrait of loves lost and found and a testament to the work of mothers. "So little is permissible for a woman," writes Lilli, “yet on her back every human climbs to adulthood.”
“A powerful, authentic voice for a generation of women whose struggles were erased from history—a heart-smashing debut that completely satisfies.”
—Jamie Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
A young woman finds the most powerful love of her life when she gives birth at an institution for unwed mothers in 1883 Philadelphia. She is told she must give up her daughter to avoid lifelong poverty and shame. But she chooses to keep her.
 
Pregnant, left behind by her lover, and banished from her Quaker home and teaching position, Lilli de Jong enters a home for wronged women to deliver her child. She is stunned at how much her infant needs her and at how quickly their bond overtakes her heart. Mothers in her position face disabling prejudice, which is why most give up their newborns. But Lilli can’t accept such an outcome. Instead, she braves moral condemnation and financial ruin in a quest to keep herself and her baby alive.
 
Confiding their story to her diary as it unfolds, Lilli takes readers from an impoverished charity to a wealthy family's home to the streets of a burgeoning American city. Drawing on rich history, Lilli de Jong is both an intimate portrait of loves lost and found and a testament to the work of mothers. "So little is permissible for a woman," writes Lilli, “yet on her back every human climbs to adulthood.”
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Excerpts-
  • From the book

    1883. Third Month 16

    Some moments set my heart on fire, and that’s when language seems the smallest. Yet precisely these bursts of feeling make me long to write. I sit now in a high-walled courtyard, amid the green smells and slanted light of early spring, with that familiar burning in my heart. I’ll need to destroy these pages before returning home, but no matter; for the first time since Mother’s death, words come to me.

    I’ve lost more than I’ve gained since Mother died last year, when I was but twenty-two. Yet I wish to tell of some good things. This small courtyard with its carved stone bench, for instance, which fast becomes my refuge. For with spring upon us, there is such a wellness in the out of doors. Crocuses peer from the melting snow. Budding trees sweeten the air with their exhalations. If I were at home, I’d have turned the soil in our kitchen garden today, and planted radish and lettuce seeds besides. For supper, I’d have made a soup from the hardy kale and onions that survived the winter.

    But I’m not at home. I’m at the Philadelphia Haven for Women and Infants. I’ve fled the building to this sheltered patch of ground to escape the struggles of my roommate Nancy—who till this morning slept in a bed beside mine and now moans and yells from the birthing table. Her sounds are as guttural and plaintive as those of a dog with its leg clamped in a trap. Even the stoutest girls among us have gone pale from hearing, for each will have her turn soon, and then will return from disgrace only by giving up her offspring and denying its existence ever after—as I will do.

    For Gina and me, who share a room with Nancy, the anxiousness began last night with Nancy’s moaning and tossing in her sleep. At dawn she awoke, her thighs and sheets wet with a watery fluid.

    “No one came for me!” she wailed as Gina and I wiped her clean. She wasn’t crying from bodily pain—not yet; she cried from understanding, at the age of sixteen, that her daily hope of rescue had reached its end. Her parents had sent her to domestic service in the city, and for three years they’d relied on the money she sent home to their farm. She lost her work due to her pregnancy, which arose from misplaced trust in a fellow servant, as she explained to us one whisper-filled night. Yet though she’d written many pleas, her parents had supplied no aid, made no visit, sent no letter of condolence.

    Gina bent her head of dark curls to kiss Nancy’s cheek. I squeezed her hand and eased her into a clean nightgown. And despite the fact that Gina and I are in our ninth months, too, we helped her down a flight of stairs and to the chamber of the Haven’s matron, Delphinia Partridge. At the door, we knocked and waited while Nancy hung about our shoulders.

    Soon the bleary matron emerged, clad in a worn blue dressing gown, her silver hair tucked beneath a sleeping cap. We walked tothe delivery room, where she encouraged a shivering Nancy to lie upon the birthing table.

    To Gina and me the matron said, “Wake up the cook. Tell her to fetch the doctor.” She motioned with her head toward the door. But Nancy grabbed Gina’s plump arm and held it. Her lips were pale from how hard she pressed them together.

    “I can stay?” Gina asked Delphinia. She came from Italy two years ago and speaks well for that.

    Delphinia shook her head, unyielding. So we traveled the hall and woke the cook, who pulled a Mother Hubbard over her large form and ran out to fetch Dr. Stevens, a professor at the Woman’s Medical...

About the Author-
  • JANET BENTON’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Glimmer Train, and many other publications. She has cowritten and edited historical documentaries for television. She holds a B.A. in religious studies from Oberlin College and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and for decades she has taught writing and helped individuals and organizations craft their stories. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and daughter. Lilli de Jong is her first novel.
Reviews-
  • Publisher's Weekly

    March 20, 2017
    In the forthright prose of its eponymous heroine, Benton’s heartrending debut novel gives voice to the plight of unwed mothers in late-19th-century Philadelphia. Instead of starting a new life with her fiancé, 22-year-old Lilli de Jong discovers that she is pregnant. Once sheltered by her Quaker community, Lilli can no longer associate with respectable society, including her own family. The Philadelphia Haven for Women and Infants promises Lilli a reputable adoption and a fresh start, albeit one built on lies. But nothing prepares Lilli for motherhood and the cruel world beyond. She dares to keep her daughter, but must choose, again and again, between her principles and necessities. Told through Lilli’s journals, the book offers a distressing window into the intersections of motherhood, independence, faith, and class at a time when even affluent white women had little control over their lives. Benton’s exacting research fuels Lilli’s passionate, authentic voice that is “as strong as a hand on a drum... that pounds its urgent messages across a distance.” Most poignant are the heartfelt depictions of the dualities of motherhood, “a land where pain and joy are ever mingled and where… every move has consequence.” Lilli’s inspiring power and touching determination are timeless. Agent: Jane von Mehren, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth.

  • Kirkus

    March 15, 2017
    A young Quaker woman struggles to keep her out-of-wedlock child in 1880s Pennsylvania.At the book's opening, Lilli de Jong is a former schoolteacher committing her story to paper from the confines of a Philadelphia charity for unwed mothers. Amid descriptions of life in the haven along with stirring encounters with other ostracized girls there, Lilli's own history unfolds. Abandoned by her fiance, relieved of her job, and banned from Meeting due to misconduct of her father's, Lilli is forced to conceal her pregnancy and flee her home in Germantown. She plans to give her baby up for adoption three weeks after birth, since seeking employment, acceptance, and even shelter as an unwed woman with a child is nearly impossible. Soon Lilli bears a little girl and finds she cannot part with her. The trials Lilli undertakes to keep her baby are heart-rending, and it's a testament to Benton's skill as a writer that the reader cannot help but bear witness. In a style reminiscent of Geraldine Brooks, she seamlessly weaves accurate historical detail as well as disturbing societal norms into the protagonist's struggles. A diary as a literary device can be both trying for the reader and a restrictive device for an author to wield, but Benton pulls it off with grace. At times the story is bogged down with repetitive and somewhat obsessive descriptions of nursing, but that's a minor point when cast against the monumental accomplishment the novel achieves. In the modern battle for rights for working mothers and equal pay for equal work, Benton holds a mirror up to the past and in doing so, illustrates how far we have come as well as how far we have yet to go. An absorbing debut from a writer to watch.

    COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  • Library Journal

    Starred review from April 15, 2017

    Lilli de Jong, discharged from her teaching job and banished from Quaker meetings because of her father's selfish choice, finds comfort in the affections of her father's apprentice, Johan. The night before he leaves to embark on a new life, she succumbs to his embrace with his promise that he will send for her. Soon thereafter, a pregnant Lilli finds herself shunned and alone, her only option a Philadelphia charity for wronged women. Knowing that she must relinquish her newborn, she is unprepared for the love that she feels for her daughter. Lilli quickly decides to fight to keep her, but in 1883 that means a life of hardship and deprivation. Telling Lilli's story in diary form, debut author Benton has written a captivating, page-turning, and well-researched novel about the power of a mother's love and the stark reality of the choices she must make. VERDICT A great choice for book clubs and readers of Geraldine Brooks.--Susan Santa, Shelter Rock P.L., Albertson, NY

    Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

  • Booklist

    April 15, 2017
    In a short space of time, a young Quaker woman poised to begin a new life was reduced to begging on the streets to keep herself and her infant daughter alive. The story of how Lilli de Jong falls so completely after unexpectedly becoming pregnant offers a harrowing look at the strictures of nineteenth-century American society. Many of the other unwed mothers at the Philadelphia charity where Lilli takes shelter before giving birth were victims of unwanted sexual conquests, now forced to abandon their babies to adoption while their abusers live without consequences. But Lilli refuses to leave her daughter to the cruel life awaiting an illegitimate child, instead fighting to her last scrap of resolve to keep her as her own. She is a full-fledged heroine, persevering despite seemingly insurmountable odds, including her own loss of faith. While it's hard to believe she would have the time to devote to the diary entries that comprise the book, her voice is distinctive, her fierceness driven by a mother's love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

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Janet Benton
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