THE SECRET LIFE OF DOROTHY SOAMES

An attorney and environmentalist probes her troubled mother's past as the child inmate of the centuries-old Foundling Hospital of London.

Cowan’s English-born mother lived in "blind idolatry of wealth and status" and claimed to be descended from a line of Welsh nobles. But behind the facade and her hypercritical ways lurked a secret that the author began to uncover only after her mother's death from Alzheimer's. Haunted by their unrelentingly difficult relationship, Cowan began piecing together her story by investigating a carefully prepared memoir her mother had sent to "acknowledge her role" in their painfully adversarial relationship. The manuscript offered details of the years she had spent growing up at the Foundling Hospital, later renamed Coram after its 18th-century founder, Thomas Coram. The author’s mother—renamed Dorothy Soames—had suffered multiple traumas in her life as a foundling. From the foster mother who instilled a fear of Coram from an early age to the cruel nurses who routinely humiliated her and thought nothing of using physical violence as a disciplinary tool, Dorothy's caretakers showed her little love. Her later education prepared her only for "a life of service" and offered no latitude for "independent thought.” The only refuge in her otherwise dreary and isolated existence was friendship with a fellow foundling. After reading the memoir and visiting the hospital, Cowan realized the terrible impact of her mother's past, partially to blame for her raising her daughter according to a "warped, dystopian version of what she imagined a proper British upbringing to be.” The author’s historical analysis of the misogyny and classism that underlay the institution’s outwardly humanitarian mission makes this memoir especially compelling. Well-researched and highly personal, the book presents a fascinating narrative tapestry that both informs and moves.

A candidly illuminating debut memoir.