This reading group guide for The Butterfly Cabinet includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Bernie McGill. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the
book

Introduction

When Maddie McGlade, a former nanny now in her nineties, receives a letter from the last of her charges, she realizes that the time has come to unburden herself of a secret she has kept for decades: What really happened on the last day in the life of Charlotte Ormond, the four-year-old only daughter of the big house where Maddie was employed in her youth? The Butterfly Cabinet unfolds in chapters that alternate between Maddie’s story—as told to Anna, Charlotte’s would-be great-niece—and the prison diaries of Charlotte’s mother, Harriet, who was held responsible for her daughter’s death.

Topics and Questions for Discussion

1.      How did you feel about the dual-narrator structure of the book? Did you want to hear more from Anna? Were there any other characters whose narration you would have liked to read as well?

2.      What parts of the book took you most by surprise? What were your favorite moments? 

3.      Who do you think was the most conflicted character in the book? Why? How about the most tragic?

4.      Maddie said to Anna, “Everyone should have a person in their life to tell them stories of their birth.” (p. 7) Who is that person for you? What are some of your favorite stories about you as a child?

5.      Who do you think was the more reliable narrator, Harriet or Maddie? Why?

6.      Harriet describes her parenting philosophy, stating: “It is a kindness to teach them as soon as is possible that they cannot always do as they would, without regard for others. It is for their own safety and their own self-preservation.” (p. 149) Do you agree? Do you think Harriet adhered to this method of parenting? Why or why not?

7.      Harriet states, “I watched with relief as Harry and then Thomas and James were sent off to school, regretted only that the others were too young to go.” (p. 151) How does this confession affect your perception of Harriet as a mother? Do you feel any sympathy for Harriet?

8.      Discuss the relationship between Harriet and her mother. What behaviors did Harriet learn from her mother? In what ways do you think Harriet’s mother influenced Harriet’s personality and parenting style?

9.      Maddie wrote about the legend of Molly Bradley: “There was always a point behind those stories we were told. Dark warnings as to what could happen to a girl who didn’t guard herself: keep your coat buttoned up tight; stay out of the dark of the hedges; don’t talk to the tinkers, they’ll turn your head; be wary of men.” (p. 128) What were the purpose of these stories? Based on what you read, how did these stories influence Maddie? Were you ever told any kind of “cautionary tales” as a child?

10.  Do you think Maddie was in the right when she wrote the letter to the Cruelty Society? What do you think you would have done in the same situation?

11.  The press acted as a Greek chorus of sorts in Harriet’s trial. At one point, she described the papers as saying, “‘There is still one law for the rich and another for the poor.’” (p. 71) Do you think Harriet was treated differently because of her social status? Do you think a similar distinction between “rich law” and “poor law” exists today?

12.  Consider Harriet’s conclusion that “the whole process of the trial must be designed to humiliate the defendant. Since one is not permitted to speak, what other reason can there be for being present?” (p. 174) Discuss the differences between the judicial system Harriet went through and the one in place in America today. Do you think the modern American system is any more fair or more kind than the one that Harriet experienced?

13.  Reread the paragraphs starting with “I took the carriage to Coleraine, into Stewart and Hamilton . . .” on page 210. In revisiting Harriet’s side of Charlotte’s death, do you see any moral wiggle room in her account? Can you sympathize with Harriet at all?

14.  Harriet’s trial for Charlotte’s death set out to determine, as Harriet described, whether “wickedness or evil intention had motivated my actions.” (p. 179) Harriet went on to say, “I meant to punish her, certainly. I meant to correct her behavior, without doubt. I did not mean to injure her, not in any way. I was trying to teach her how to save herself.” (p. 179) Do you believe Harriet?

15.  The final opinion of the jury was that “the crime had been committed through a mistaken sense of duty” (p. 180). Do you agree? If you were on Harriet’s jury, how would you have ruled?

16.  Maddie asked Anna, in reference to her taking the key to the wardrobe room, “Is a lie always something you’ve said that’s not the truth, or can it be something you’ve never said? Can a lie be a truth you’ve never told, not to anyone? Not in the confessional, and not in the witness box? Is it any defense to say you were never asked?” (p. 125) Do you think that, in keeping the key story secret, Maddie lied about her culpability in Charlotte’s death? How do you personally define a lie?

17.  Harriet often described her life in fairly despondent terms, writing, for example, “My whole life spent in the way of myself: working in my own shade, not able to crawl out from underneath it, obliterating with my own being what I have been striving so hard to try to achieve.” (p. 52) What do you think Harriet was striving to achieve, and what was she fighting against? What do you think was the source of Harriet’s profound unhappiness?

18.  Consider Harriet’s love of butterflies. Why do you think Harriet was so drawn to the creatures? “How hard the smallest of creatures will try for life,” she writes. (p. 139) Do you see the butterflies as a metaphor for something or someone else?

19.  Harriet described the wallpaper she bought for the sitting room where she kept her butterflies as “an extraordinary design of white dove and gilt cage with a background so dark as to be almost black. Unexpectedly, when…the light caught it near the window, the narrow bars of the cage all but disappeared, leaving only the gilt base and the bird apparently freed, about to take flight, while in the darker corners of the room the flickering firelight picked out the gilt and showed the bird to be exquisitely caged.” (p. 52) What symbolism do you see in this passage?

20.  After Maddie told Anna about how Harriet died—she fell from her horse—Maddie added, “Since we’re in the business of telling the truth, Anna, I’ll tell you this. Feeley said she was the best horsewoman in the country, and no horse that he knew of would dare to throw her off if she didn’t want to be thrown.” (p. 139) Do you think Harriet committed suicide?

Enhance Your Book Club

1.      Visit a butterfly museum or butterfly zoo with your reading group, and see if the butterflies inspire you in the same way that they did Harriet: “The colors, the markings, the scales on the wing, each one different, each one unique: the wonder of nature transfixed,” she writes. “[Butterflies are] a piece of earth made heaven-bound. To look at a butterfly is to remind us of what we are and of what we will be again.” (p. 121) After your trip, do you see Harriet any differently?

a.       Visit en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_zoo#United_States or www.butterfly-houses.com for lists of butterfly zoos in the US, or Google “butterfly museum” or “butterfly zoo,” followed by your hometown, to find local alternatives.

b.      If you can’t visit a butterfly museum, go to the photo gallery at www.butterfliesandmoths.org/gallery to see a wide variety of beautiful close-up photos of butterflies.

c.       You can also visit the American Museum of Natural History’s butterfly website at www.amnh.org/exhibitions/butterflies/cams.php# and click on “Click To View Our Live Butterfly Web Cam” to check in with the tropical butterflies at AMNH in real time.

2.      The theme of passing stories down from generation to generation is central to The Butterfly Cabinet. Reach out to an older family member or friend and ask them for a story that they want to pass down to you. If you have contact with younger generations, reach out to them and tell them a story from your memory that you want to keep in the family. Or, if you prefer, write out a family story—either one you’ve heard or one you want to share—and bring your writing to book club. Once you’re all together, share your stories!

3.      Though The Butterfly Cabinet in its entirety is fictional, the author used a true story for inspiration. Do a bit of research on the real-life story and the historical backdrop that inspired The Butterfly Cabinet, and bring your findings to the book club. Possible topics include, but aren’t limited to, Cromore House; the Montagu family; Annie Margaret Montagu; the history of the Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children; Grangegorman Prison; the history of lepidopterology; and women’s rights in late-1800s Ireland. Refer to the Author’s Note for more ideas. Once you’re together, discuss how the real-life story differed from the fictionalized one. How did your understanding of the novel change after connecting it to concrete historical events?

 
A Conversation with Bernie McGill

You’ve written plays as well as short stories and novels.  How has your experience with playwriting (and with watching your plays unfold in front of you) affected your fiction writing?

Writing for the theatre, in my experience at least, is a much more collaborative process than writing fiction. During the making of a theatre piece, there are a number of voices in the room, there’s more input from other creative people, all of whom have an investment in the final made thing. When it comes to writing fiction it makes you very aware that the choices you make are your own. I always read my fiction aloud, I need to hear what’s being said to gauge its authenticity. I think theatre writing makes you a more spare fiction writer; it makes you aware of how much you can show and how little you need to tell. It makes you realize how redundant most adjectives are and how important nouns and verbs are, the real nuts and bolts of writing. And I think it helps you to focus on what happens. You need to treat your potential reader with the same respect you’d grant an audience member, ask yourself, “Would an audience sit through this?” If the answer’s no, then you know what to do. Get the scissors out and start cutting.

You write on your website about gleaning the editorial services of a fussy Annaghmakerrig table lamp at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, a writer’s and artist’s retreat. Do you find yourself at the mercy of any other unorthodox editors during the writing process?

There are a number of techniques that we use in the writing groups I work with to “test”your writing, questions such as “Does this passage move the story forward?”; “Where does this incident take us?”; “Is this piece of writing absolutely essential?” I am guilty of being seduced by the poetry of language, I become attached to a piece of writing because it sounds good, but you do have to remind yourself that you’re telling a story, that you need to keep the reader with you at all times. My UK editor did a fantastic job on the first draft of The Butterfly Cabinet, and many of her edits could be paraphrased thus: “Beautiful piece of writing, what’s the point of it?” I use the second part of that phrase now when I’m writing to help me focus.

Per your website, the original title of The Butterfly Cabinet was The Lepidopterist. Why did you change the title? Were your earlier drafts more focused on Harriet—the lepidopterist—and less on the symbolism of the butterfly cabinet?

The Lepidopterist was always a working title; before that the book was called The Sea Diaries. I always thought it was a little inaccessible as a title; in general I try and avoid Latinate phrases and go for the more direct Anglo-Saxon choice. But it got me through the first draft. Harriet was always the main protagonist of the book, Maddie was invented to act as a foil to her, but she ended up having an important role to play, not just in the telling of the story, but in the story itself.  The story is fairly evenly divided up between the two narratives. I think it was my agent who suggested The Butterfly Cabinet as a title, either her or my editor, and I liked it, so we went with it. It changed the book a little—the cabinet became more prominent, and I had to come up with an explanation of how it had ended up in Maddie’s possession, but it’s fun trying to work those things out.

 
On your website, you talk about the process by which you decided to relocate your fictional story away from the castle where the real-life inspiration occurred. What parts of the historical record—the newspaper articles about Harriet, the prison details, or the maid work, for example—did you adopt more directly?

It’s very hard to say what percentage of the book is fictional and what percentage is more closely tied to fact. In broad terms, the events surrounding the child’s death follow the testimonies as related by witnesses at the trial. According to the newspaper reports, the child was put in the wardrobe room by the governess because she had soiled herself. The mother was out of the house at the time, and when she returned she went in to the child, tied her by the hands to a ring on the wall, went out, locked the door, put the key in her pocket, and left her alone for about three hours. When she returned, the child was dead. These events were related by the mother at the inquest that was held in the house the following day. Harriet’s backstory is a complete invention, as is her obsession with butterflies, and Maddie is an entirely fictional character, although in some ways, she is a kind of collage, inspired by the servants who gave evidence at the trial. The prison details and the maidservants’ work came from reading social histories of the period. I wanted to make those two worlds as authentic as I possibly could. I also visited the National Archive in Dublin to read the original prison records for Grangegorman. It was really strange to see the mother’s name there, written by someone who had actually known her, would have dealt with her on a daily basis. That was far more chilling than reading about her in the newspapers. It made it very real to me.

How did you land upon the idea of two narrators (plus a few brief letters from Anna) for your story? Did you ever consider adding more voices?

It was very important to me that we heard Harriet’s story. As I said above, she made a statement at the inquest, hours after the child’s death, which was recorded and reread on several occasions, and printed in the newspapers. It was a fairly bald, emotionless statement of fact and it makes for very uncomfortable reading. She comes across as a fairly cold individual. But I think that was what intrigued me most. As far as I understand it, the law at the time was such that neither the defendant, nor members of the defendant’s immediate family, were permitted to give evidence during a trial, so these printed words by the mother are the only words of hers that we have. I wanted to know what she would have said, had she been given the chance. There were questions I wanted to ask her, and this was the only means I had of having her speak. There was no question in my mind that Harriet should be allowed to talk for herself.

As for Maddie, I was looking around for someone who could offer another version of events, and for a while I became interested in the idea that that other character might be a reporter working on the case. I eventually rejected this idea, though, because I wanted that other person to have an insight into the workings of the household, both before and after the child’s death. For a while, I entertained the notion that the other narrator might be Julia, Harriet’s sister, but I became more and more drawn to a servant’s voice. I wanted someone who would contrast with Harriet in terms of their social standing, their upbringing and education, and who had that duality that servants often had: someone who was an integral member of the household but who could be a witness to events, almost unseen. Other voices do come into the story—Edward’s, the children’s, the other servants’—but all filtered through Harriet and Maddie. I’m always interested in how people’s versions of events will differ from one another, how we all put our own spin on things. That relationship between truth and interpretation is very engaging, I think.

Which character would you most want to be friends with? Why?

I think Peig sounds like a good soul, and Maddie as a young woman would have been fun to know, and you could have had a good old flirt with Alphie. I think Harriet’s the kind of woman you would avoid at the school gates but gossip about endlessly with your friends. “Did you hear what she said to Mrs So and So . . . ?”—that kind of thing. She’d be very unapproachable, immaculately turned-out, her domestic life would run like clockwork. You’d never have a good word to say about her but your ears would prick up every time her name was mentioned, which would be often. She’d be much maligned and much spoken about.

How did you originally stumble across the historical research that gave way to Harriet’s character? Did you know immediately that you’d found a book idea, or did the idea resurface later in your mind?

I came across the story in a local parish magazine, just a short article about the big house up the road and the mother who’d been imprisoned for the killing of her young daughter. It lodged in my brain. I pass the entrance to the house regularly, and every time I did it sent a shiver up my spine. My own children were fairly young at the time, around five and seven. I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened there, so short a distance from my own home, albeit more than a hundred years before. Around that time, I’d been awarded a grant from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to write a collection of short stories. I decided to start with this one. My idea was to write about ten stories, roughly ten years apart in time, leading up to the present day, but I couldn’t get away from this one story. Everything I wrote led back to it again. I was working with a mentor, a writer named Damian Gorman, and he suggested that there might be scope for a novel. It was a frightening idea, but after a bit of persuasion, I decided to give it a go. The research was quite time-consuming, but I kept coming across aspects of the story that held me—at the time of her imprisonment, the mother was pregnant with her ninth child. The child who died was the only daughter in the family. I’m the youngest of a family of ten children, seven boys and three girls. I’m sure it had some bearing on my interest.

 
Did the butterfly theme come from historical research or from your own construction of Harriet?

The butterfly theme was an invention of my own. I had read that the mother was a keen and skilled horse rider, a huntswoman, and a renowned horse breaker. This passion of hers seemed to fit very neatly into the image of her as a strict disciplinarian, but I was looking for something a little more poetic. I had been reading about the Victorians, about the legacy of Darwin, the rise in interest in the study of the animal world, the apparent lack of squeamishness around collecting, preserving, studying insects and much larger animals. That image of the collectors’ cabinet is, I think, quintessentially of that era. I began to wonder if Harriet was a collector and if so, what that meant. Was she someone who could only appreciate the beauty of the thing when it was still? I thought that if that were true, that that was both chilling and sad, and that seemed to fit with who I thought she was.

 
You write on your website, of Harriet, “I wasn't trying to justify what she'd done, I didn't particularly want to identify with her, but I did feel compelled to try and understand the motivations of that fictional character she had become.” By now, at the end of the writing process, do you feel you understand her motivations? Are there parts of her as a character that you still don’t understand?

There are, absolutely, parts of Harriet that I don’t understand, that I’m wary of understanding. I did want to get inside her head, but I didn’t particularly want to dwell there. It was, as I’ve said before, a dark place to be. I’m glad I don’t have to be there anymore. There are things I admire about her as an individual. When she made the statement at the inquest about locking the door and putting the key in her pocket, she essentially damned herself from her own mouth. She was saying, “I, and I alone, am to blame.” She wasn’t allowing room for speculation, which is, of course, what caused me to speculate when I was writing the book.

 
You write in your website bio, “I love the contract that's made between writers and readers/audiences: when people sit down, individually or together, and conspire to believe in what is openly, transparently, not true.” What messages or emotions do you hope to convey to your readers in this particular shared conspiracy of belief?

I always look for emotional truth in fiction, for characters that you can believe in, who do things that you may or may not agree with, but which you can understand. I think that’s the real joy of fiction and the theatre, and if those made-up people doing made-up things can cause you to look at the world a little differently, be a little more tolerant, a little less judgmental, then I think the art form is doing its job. Sometimes we need a medium like that, or a mirror, or a filter, we need to look at make-believe in order to get a clearer perspective on our own world. I love George Eliot’s definition, in The Mill on the Floss, of metaphor: “we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else.” We seem to need to pretend, sometimes, that a thing is something else in order to appreciate what it is. You should always come away from a story or a book or from the theatre a little changed, I think, in your outlook, a little cheered, or a little more enlightened, or a little better informed, or a little more sympathetic, otherwise what’s the point?

 
Do you have any ideas for, or beginnings of, a second novel right now? If not, what do you plan to work on next?

I’m tentatively working on a second novel set on Rathlin, a small inhabited island off the north coast of Ireland. It was the site, in 1898, of some of the first wireless experiments conducted by Marconi’s engineers. Even nowadays, the island is occasionally cut off in bad weather. I love the idea that this relatively remote and isolated place, which didn’t have electricity until the early 1990s, was the site of such experimental technology at the end of the nineteenth century that people were able to send and receive messages between there and the mainland without the aid of cables or wires. It must have seemed like magic was at work. I’m fascinated by that idea that your words can travel beyond you, specifically in the context of a community that knew all too well what it was to be isolated from the rest of the world.

Before your writing career took off, you worked as a theater manager and events coordinator. Would you consider going back to the theater, or are you firmly and happily entrenched in the writer’s path now?

At the moment, I seem to be a fiction writer, but I’d love to write again for the theater. It is a magical place, even, maybe especially, when you know what it looks like from behind the scenes. When I was a student I worked as an usherette in the Queen’s Film Theater in Belfast. We used to view the same film six, seven times or more, and even though the film never changed, even though what was showing on the screen was essentially fixed, the experience was never the same twice because the audience took on a different personality for every screening. Imagine how much more exciting it is to experience a theatre piece, often in a different performance space, always in front of a new audience, and where the actors respond directly to the exigencies of that space and those people every time. It is wholly live, it is never, ever the same twice, nor could it possibly be, and that’s what’s most exciting about it. There are some stories that work better in the theatre, that need to be seen and not told, and when I next find one, that’s where I’ll take it.