The legend goes that in billowing all-white dress in November 1679, Lady Christian Nimmo was beheaded in Mercat Cross for killing her extramarital lover in a fit of rage.
She was one of 150 victims executed by the book’s titular Maiden—not the cloaked, pale-faced, purple-clad girl in the cover’s foreground, but the imposing, guillotine-like structure behind her.
A pre-French Revolution example of a beheading device, the Scottish Maiden decapitated criminal and political victims between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries with an iron ax blade prised with lead weights.
Scottish journalist and debut author Kate Foster centers her captivating revisionist novel The Maiden, deservingly longlisted for the Women’s Prize, around Lady Nimmo’s execution. The execution takes place in her village of Corstorphine on the outskirts of Edinburgh—a neighborhood that, to this day, wears the local legend in its sensationalized sycamore tree and the name of “White Lady pub.”
Lady Nimmo is one of our two narrators. The other is Violet: a vulgar but warm-hearted prostitute in central Edinburgh. The two are each other’s antitheses. Violet’s cheeks blush with a tacky pink—to simulate the look of pleasure, she says—while Christian, a socially polite lady, would opt for a nobler, paler complexion. Violet dwells in a brothel; Lady Nimmo, in Roseburn House. Both characters, like all seventeenth-century women, are at the mercy of men—a detail that feels grimly resonant in our post-Roe America.
Whether or not these women lived or breathed, Foster certainly speaks for the voiceless. The primary source Foster cites in her author’s note includes a man who calls the real Nimmo’s life a “godless” one. But, Foster thinks, it could not have been so simple. She must have been provoked, hurt, abused. All we know of Nimmo comes from the men in her orbit; Foster imagines a voice for the damned figure.
As a young woman burgeoning into her adulthood, Christian’s mother scrambles to arrange an advantageous marriage with a wealthy and worldly fabric merchant, who is repulsed by Christian’s body and the thought of consummating their union—for reasons never blatantly articulated.
It is no surprise when she turns to her brooding, estate-owning uncle by marriage James Forrester. Their affair is desperate and uncomfortable to read, but drawn out propulsively. Still, no matter the laird’s tall love confessions and sweeping gestures, one woman cannot quench his fathomless need for intimacy: he habitually keeps lovers in an adjoined turret—a reveal that is skillful and slow but unsurprising, and the event that intersects Violet and Lady Christian.
The novel’s second paragraph already heralds Forrester’s contradiction: “The sheriff’s words clang, pious as the bells of St Giles’, all the way from the court back into the jail.” Foster establishes a dichotomy: the court, and the jail. The pious, and the criminal. The just, and the wretched. Yet the two concepts quickly muddle together and reveal a profound hypocrisy. Forrester is a leading figure of his town’s church but engages in deeds more nefarious than the women he rebukes.
Much of this story is an invention of Foster’s. The historical fiction novel allows the fiction to outweigh the history, but rather than weakening the narrative, the choice invites intrigue and imagination. The voices are modern, even anachronistic—“Time for another whisky!” Violet exclaims—but the emotions escape temporal bounds.
Even if details are invented, the atmosphere certainly feels real, immersive. Herein lies one of Foster’s greatest successes: the reader can feel the sticky, lusty air of the brothel; the damp funereal grass; a sprawling lavish mansion and a claustrophobic jail cell.
The book includes a dual timeline. The first chapter is a breathless, desperate goodbye from Christian, positing the brutal end that will come full circle by the novel’s end. This prologue is useful: it establishes stakes and urgency. The same dual timeline snakes through the rest of the story, in chapters finished with broadsheet clippings. As the story continues, however, this later storyline proves itself superfluous and—towards the end of the novel, when the timelines converge—murky in its distinctions.
But the book’s impression was largely positive. In terms of pacing, whereas many novels find trouble in a muddled middle and develop a racing speed at the end, The Maiden’s center was strongest. The tension hung, thick and cloudy, through the throes of both women’s affairs—in anticipation of the crime the reader anticipated but had innumerable questions about.
Indeed, the crime acts as the centerpiece, the hinge, of the novel. It is a point of orientation for the length of the work, developing dimensions yet remaining an enigma. After the crime is committed, the culprit remains unclear for slow, drawn-out chapters. Even when the reader discovers the laird’s murderer, the mystery lingers. The question of who is eclipsed only by the question of why.
The story brims with sex; lust and sensuality are pivotal to the narrative’s unfolding. But the tone is more haunting than it is ever steamy. The book claims residence in a reader’s head for the weeks that follow: Violet’s raunchy dialogue, Christian’s moral ambiguity, and the final, murderous act. The characters are vivid and distinct, their gendered struggles historical yet timely—all culminating in a work of fiction that resonates with the contemporary woman.
Hudson Warm is an editor-in-chief for the Yale Herald 2026-2027.
