What must it feel like to be hanged, only to wake up four hours later, in your own coffin, and to climb out and walk into your own wake? Ask Maggie Dickson, because in Chapter One of The Mourning Necklace that is precisely what happens to her. The year is 1724 and the place, Edinburgh. Will the honest men of law decide to give her a reprieve or will they choose to hang her again? Her sentence was ‘hanging’, they had not yet added ‘by the neck until dead’ and Maggie had been hanged…and survived. She has served her sentence.

After she has presented herself to her family, Maggie goes willingly to see the constable and is returned to her cell while they debate what should be done with her. She is viewed with mistrust by the other inmates who wonder what pact she made with the devil to survive a hanging. Ultimately, however, she is allowed to go free.

The novel is divided into three parts, obviously not chronological, given their titles: ‘Hanging Day’, ‘Before the Hang’ and ‘After the Hang’.

Maggie Dickson had had a hard life as the daughter of a Scottish fisherman who drank too much and gave vent to his temper all too frequently. Her mother was a fishwife who favoured Joan, Maggie’s younger and prettier sister. Maggie found herself doing all the chores when her sister felt tired or simply bored with the hard grind of daily life. Unappreciated and overlooked, Maggie is resentful but has her dreams of a life far away in London town. She meets Patrick Spencer who marries her and makes those dreams seem like a possibility. Suddenly, life for Maggie is better, she is happy for a while, but her happiness is shortlived for Patrick is press ganged, another painful historical detail. Cruelly snatched from her, it seems she will never see him again.

She runs away, heading for London, to realise her dreams, and Foster takes us on Maggie’s painful journey where she meets all sorts including a schemer, who cheats her before she can get too far. She is naïve but she is also resilient and she needs to be when she discovers she is pregnant. Her crime is to keep it secret and she pays a bitter price.

Maggie sees death, feels the weight of dishonour and the hand of a brutal and unforgiving law on her shoulder but time and again, she proves her resilience. She meets helpful souls, Mrs Baxter for one and Aunt Jenever for another and she sees for herself the wickedness of men. Even the hangman, despised by many, proves he should be the one dangling at the end of the rope. By the end, she comes to know love once more and is reunited with her mother and sister with whom she bonds in a way previously unknown to them all.

As ever, my measure is the time it takes to read it and as I didn’t want to put it down, it wasn’t long!

The Mourning Necklace is a re-imagining of the true story of ‘Half-Hanged Maggie’ and is all the more dramatic for it. It explores themes of injustice and unfairness, especially towards women in a world ruled by men. It questions the law: why should a woman be put to death for concealing her pregnancy if the baby should then die? It describes a life of poverty and the harsh working conditions experienced by many honest folk and takes a peek at some of the things they did to try to alleviate the awfulness of their lives. Prison life was no picnic either and Foster neither exaggerates nor conceals the hellholes in which prisoners found themselves incarcerated.

Foster keeps this real, creating twists and turns in the drama of a life. There are moments of joy and hope, moments of fear and of despair and you cannot but admire Maggie’s defiance in the face of all the obstacles in her path. Nor can you help but breathe a sigh of relief when she eventually comes through it all, older and wiser, battle-scarred but at peace with who she is, wearing as she does The Mourning Necklace, the scar from the hangman’s noose, which never quite goes away.

The legend of Half-Hanged Maggie is apparently well-known in Edinburgh and this retelling, with some poetic license, makes it accessible to all. As ever, my measure is the time it takes to read it and as I didn’t want to put it down, it wasn’t long!


The Mourning Necklace is published by Pan Books