I am very excited to be bringing you an extract from The Maternal Element by Kate Nicholls. I love books which feature forgotten women and this one looks fabulous.
The Blurb
Siberia 1833.
Forty-one-year-old Maria Mendeleeva is enduring her seventeenth pregnancy. Her husband Ivan has lost his sight, and her brother Vasily has left their grandfather’s glass factory in ruins. The factory Maria hungered for as a child. On the brink of poverty and her family’s only remaining hope, Maria must find a way to make the factory viable. She must find the power to bring her grandfather's dreams back to life. She must make the glass sing.
The Maternal Element is a sweeping, gripping epic with an extraordinary woman at its heart. Maria Mendeleeva – mother of Dmitri Mendeleev, who devised the Periodic Table of the Elements – is a heroine like no other. A woman who refuses to be quashed by circumstance, Maria fights against the strictures of her time to gain an education for herself and for her children as she traverses the Urals of Russia seeking opportunity and safety for her family. A vivid and visceral portrait of a woman history has long since forgotten, The Maternal Element is a manifesto for truth, female empowerment and defying societal expectations.
The Extract
“Why must I stay at home and study all alone? I know there are questions that I cannot ask because I am ignorant of their very existence,” Maria cried furiously one morning, pummelling her fists into a heap of flour moistened by buttermilk. She and Nyanya were preparing the midday meal with Cook, who was at the other end of the kitchen table chopping yellow onions into fine pieces and adding them to a bowl of minced pork.
“Gently, Masha, gently,” Cook instructed, “you must encourage the dough – not beat it to death.”
“Exactly my point,” declared the girl, “I want to be encouraged . . . to be allowed to grow and think and understand the world. Instead, I’m trapped at home, and without Papinka and Vasily to help me, I would be lost.”
Cook glanced at Nyanya and saw a fleeting hurt pass over her friend’s face.
“You have a good many people here to help you, Masha,” Cook retorted sharply, “and you have much to learn. One day, your Papa will not be there to give you a roof over your head, and there may not be so much good food in your pantry or so many fine pots to boil soup in.” Her knife was gathering quite terrifying speed. “Your book reading won’t feed your family or keep them warm at night, I can tell you that . . . you need to know how to squeeze the goodness out of a cabbage leaf Miss Know-it-all . . . that’s women’s work . . . and good work too, don’t you think otherwise.”
Cook ran her sleeve against her face to wipe away tiny pearls of sweat that had gathered on her brow, and Maria ran to hug her.
“I know, I know how lucky I am. You and Nyanya are my dearest friends,” cried the child, distraught to see the usually cheerful woman in such distress.
Yet, Maria’s frustration grew, and things came to a head on a rainy afternoon some months later when she and her brother fought so fiercely that they tumbled onto the floor, pulling each other’s hair, and had to be separated by their exasperated nanny.
“Vasily Kornilyev,” cried the woman, wrenching the boy from his sister’s grasp and shaking him until he rattled – the household keys around her waist clanging in lockstep with her fury. “Maria Kornilyeva, what is this? You are both too old to engage in such unruly behaviour. I have never seen such bad children. I shall put you both out in the night to freeze to death.”
“He called me foolish,” shouted the unrepentant girl, “I’m far cleverer than he and – and – I shall do great things in my life – you shall see – I shall travel far and wide like Professor Lomonosov and I shall go the far ends of the earth, just you wait. Vasily is so stupid – too – too stupid to remember the words of his poem . . . and such a wonderful poem . . . and he called me foolish and . . . oh I just hate him.”
At this she ran out of the room in a storm of tears. It transpired that Vasily had been instructed by his teacher to learn An Ode on the Benefits of Glass, by the polymath Mikhail Lomonosov. On seeing her brother struggling to recall the lengthy poem, Maria had offered to help by reading the text and gently correcting his mistakes. For a while, she urged him along, but as time passed, his fumbling became too much to bear, and finally throwing the book to the floor, she stood full square and recited the entire poem with such a flaming passion that her brother fell upon her in a fury, declaring her a foolish girl who had no right to their father’s library.
Perhaps it was irony that had caused Maria such anguish, for the ode revealed the poetic chemist’s reverence for the enigmatic material that lay somewhere between liquid and solid in which light and colour were both captured and free. It was she, not Vasily, who shared their grandfather’s passion for glass – it was she who longed to be taken to see the great furnaces in which, by glorious alchemy, sand was transformed into transparency. And it was she who trundled up stairs to watch from the upstairs window as her father and Vasily sped off in the carriage to spend weeks and weeks together in the village on the other side of the forest.
It was Vasily who cared not a jot, who would inherit the dragon’s lair.
Life was intolerably unfair.
Book Details
ISBN: 978 1784633998
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Formats: e-book and paperback
No. of Pages: 400 (paperback)
Purchase Links
About the Author
Kate Nicholls is an author and former actor who traded the stage to study evolutionary biology. She raised and home schooled five children while researching lions in the Ocavango Delta. She now lives and writes in Rome
You can also find Kate at:
(media courtesy of Random Things Tours)
(all opinions are my own)
(Bookshop.org affiliated)
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