Mrs S

Mrs S
K Patrick

‘It’s a funny thing to operate within a language that often serves to exclude, or even destroy you,’ K Patrick writes in their Granta piece ‘Notes on Craft’. ‘The idea is to stay agile, to offer something tumbling and nonstop; to not let text get the better of us.’

Mrs S, Patrick’s debut novel, is a powerful manifestation of this ideal. For the main character, an Australian lured with the promise of a visa to become ‘matron’ of an elite English boarding school, only their fixation Mrs S—the headmaster’s wife—is given a name. Text will not get the better of these characters; they evade easy categorisation.

Through the hazy heat of a long summer, the matron longs for Mrs S, building palpable erotic tension that fuels increasing secrecy and recklessness. Patrick’s motifs for this tension are delicately chosen: roses and thorns, stained glass shards, the solitary natural world as queer haven. When the matron and Mrs S give in to their connection, the excitement lifts off the page. Rarely are erotic scenes tolerable, let alone pleasurable to read, but this novel balances explicit sensuality with complex character dynamics. Every interaction feels tangible and human.

I was struck by the omnipresence of The Girls (an umbrella term for the pupils boarding at the school) and how they serve as reminder of the many and conflicting ways femininity and girlhood are conditioned. While The Girls rebel by drinking, punching boys, or sneaking out at night, the matron disrupts conformity simply by wearing a binder. In this context, the hero of the story is the matron’s quiet friendship with another butch character, who offers them a chance to be in queer community, despite their isolation and gender non-conformity. The duo’s connection rounds out the narrative, and is as much a part of the queer love story as the matron’s romantic, erotic connection with Mrs S.

I was thrilled when I heard K Patrick was launching a book, so touched was I by their ‘Notes on Craft’, and observations on language that excludes or destroys queer bodies. I had very high expectations of the novel—yet they have been exceeded. Reading Mrs S was an utterly new experience of language inclusive of a queer body like mine.

—Éadaoín Lynch