Book Review: Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth

There’s a particular kind of freedom that arrives, if you’re lucky, in the last chapters of a life. Not the freedom of open roads and infinite possibility – that’s a young person’s freedom, showy and exhausting. This is quieter: the freedom of no longer caring what people think, because you’ve run out of time to perform for them.

The Character of Mable

Sally Hepworth’s Mad Mabel introduces us to Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick, 81, grumpy, solitary, fiercely private, and armed at all times with a sharp remark and a hot cup of tea. She has lived on Kenny Lane in Melbourne for 60 years, keeping herself to herself with a discipline that looks, from the outside, like pure misanthropy. But Elsie’s self-containment isn’t actually coldness. When you’ve been the most reviled girl in Australia – Mad Mabel Waller, youngest convicted murderer in the country’s history – self-sufficiency isn’t a personality quirk, it is survival.

This Book Is a Mystery and a Handbook

The book’s genius is in its structure: past and present alternating, the 15-year-old Mabel and the 81-year-old Elsie in constant silent conversation. And what that structure quietly insists is that growing older is not, as our culture tends to frame it, a story of loss and diminishment. It’s a story of distillation. Of finding out what you actually are, once everything you performed for others has finally been stripped away.

We learn a lot about Elsie through Persephone, the relentless seven-year-old from across the road, who arrives with absolutely no sense that Elsie’s walls are meant to keep people out. And through the podcasters who want her story.

What’s striking is how the novel uses these intrusions not to diminish Elsie but to reveal what she has, over a lifetime of loneliness and survival, quietly become: someone who understands, with a clarity that only comes with age, what deserves her energy and what does not. She has no patience for performance, for social niceties that serve no one, for the comfortable cruelties of gossip. She has watched neighbors and seen what their respectability conceals. She has paid the price of being misunderstood and she has, somewhere along the way, made a kind of peace with it.

The Heart of the Book

The relationship between Elsie and Persephone is the emotional heart of the book, and it works because Hepworth resists making it sentimental. It’s not that children and the elderly naturally bond because they’re both outside the main current of productive adult life. It’s that Persephone, in her seven-year-old directness, sees Elsie without the filter of public narrative. She doesn’t know about Mad Mabel. She only knows the woman across the road, and she likes her. For someone who has been defined by a label her entire adult life, this is quietly devastating.

There is something bracing in how unsentimental Elsie is about her own age. She’s 81; she’s not performing for posterity. She has no interest in being rehabilitated in the public eye. What she wants – in the end, in the quiet – is smaller and more essential than that: to be left alone, yes, but also, it turns out, not entirely alone. To matter to someone. To have done, somewhere along the way, something that wasn’t just surviving.

I Really Enjoyed Mad Mabel

Mabel is feisty and strong, but compassionate with a soft center. I was reminded of The Tuesday Murder Club at some points in the book, but with a bit more grunt. And in the vein of The Tuesday Murder Club, Mad Mabel joins a growing shelf of fiction that refuses to treat old women as auxiliary characters in younger people’s stories.

Elsie is the story. Her history, her interiority, her grudging and hard-won capacity for love – these are what the novel is made of. And if there’s a thesis buried in all the sharp remarks and twisty plot mechanics, it’s this: the things that matter reveal themselves slowly, and often only once you’ve stopped running from them.

At 81, Mabel is done running. And what she finds, standing still, is more than she expected.

If you are interested in articles about staying vibrant and embracing change as you age, you can find more on my Website or my Substack Page. Or check out my other articles and book reviews on Sixty and Me. I love hearing from people, so please let me know your thoughts about this book or any other subject that came up as you read this review.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Have you read Mad Mabel? Have you read any other books by Sally Hepworth? What were your thoughts about the book? How did your opinion of Mabel change as you read the book? Did anything surprise you in the book? Have you read any of The Thursday Murder Club series? I’d love to hear if you saw any similarities between Mad Mabel and The Thursday Murder Club.