The Boy in the Rain
By Stephanie Cowell
Regal House Publishing 2023

“The problem with loving someone secretly,” thinks Robbie Stillman, the young artist at the heart of Stephanie Cowell’s new novel The Boy in the Rain, “is that you can no longer speak to them casually. The smallest sentences – an invitation to supper, a refusal of that invitation, an impatient look – are fraught with hope or pain.” 

Stillman is an aspiring art student in the village of Forest’s End in 1903 Nottinghamshire, and when he meets married, twenty-nine-year-old Anton Harrington (“his accent was high English, with no hint of the thicker, rumbly speech of the country”), the two fall precipitously in love despite Anton’s marriage and the Edwardian criminal strictures against homosexuality. Cowell’s narrative follows their separate and combined fates as Anton becomes increasingly passionate about the fractious populism clashing with the bloated aristocracy of the age and as Robbie … well, Robbie mostly maunders and mopes. When Keith Donovan, one of the novel’s many more interesting characters, says, “You’re boring, Stillman,” it’s hard to imagine a reader who’ll disagree.

But Robbie and Anton are certainly dramatic in their frequent declarations of love to each other, particularly when a gently-glowing prospect of genuine contentment opens before them, however briefly. “Listen to me, love,” says Robbie at one such point:

Do you know before you came into my life, I used to want to go off with a bag over my shoulder and leave everything the old man gave me, every penny? But you changed that. Now all I want is to be with you, reading and walking and singing in George’s church choir. Making sure you can paint. I have enough money so we can live like this until we’re old. I want to take care of you. I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life.

The climbing trellises in bloom; the paved pathways in summer rain; the “heavy” stone church with its kindly, accepting vicar and the unspoken understanding of the neighborhood … Cowell very deftly creates a kind of rural Edwardian Eden specifically so she can shatter it and get everybody longing to put it back together. There are hints of Brideshead Revisited in this, but since The Boy in the Rain is a furtive gay romance set in Edwardian England, it’s EM Forster’s Howards End that sets a good deal of the tone for this narrative (and of course Maurice that grounds its theme).

It’s very effectively done, trafficking very little in the hyperventilating schmaltz that tends to characterize so much of contemporary gay fiction, and some of its more noticeable faults are institutional enough to be laid at the feet of Regal House rather than Cowell herself. The choice of John Singer Sargent’s 1908 drawing of a young, tousled William Butler Yeats might be a good and perhaps sly choice for cover illustration, for instance, but the great big superimposed raindrops are, to put it mildly, not very subtle.  

But the story itself is carefully crafted and often quite moving (except for Robbie; Donovan was right – he’s boring), and Cowell does a refreshingly able-handed job of conveying how the national politics being conducted at a frenetic pace in London could and did filter down to shape the lives of people in rural hamlets. Her characters don’t just talk in order to forward her dramatic storylines – they talk like they’re going about their own lives. One happy result of this is how three-dimensional our lovelorn heroes feel. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.