A deeply researched book, The House Is on Fire is Richmond-based author Rachel Beanland’s gorgeous new historical novel, constructed out of the archives and her own narrative license. Set in Richmond, Virginia, in 1811, the book traces four characters and their communities as they struggle in the aftermath of the historic fire that destroyed the Richmond Theater and resulted in the deaths of more than 70 people, including the governor. At the time, it was the largest disaster that had occurred in the United States, drawing national attention for the significant loss of life and far-reaching impact.
“I learned about the Richmond Theater fire on the very first day I arrived in Richmond, way back in 2007,” Beanland says. “I had flown in for a job interview and spent an afternoon driving around town with a realtor. As we were passing Monumental Church, the realtor pointed and said, ‘There used to be a theater there.’ He relayed the basic facts of the fire, and I remember being immediately taken with the story.”
But it wasn’t until 2020 when Beanland decided to write about it. “I had been in the early stages of writing another novel, which was going to require a lot of travel to get right, and when all air travel ceased, I started to get nervous,” she says. “I began thinking about novels I could set in my own backyard.”
This interest ultimately led Beanland to conduct research around the fire—through the Library of Virginia and the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, among other sources—which she incorporates throughout the story in large and small ways, carefully balanced with intimately human stories of tragedy and resilience.
“People’s race, gender, and class had much to do with whether they lived or died that night,” she says. “So, as I thought about how I’d structure the novel, I knew I wanted to write characters whose stories encompassed these different points of view.”
The characters whose lives and struggles the author braids together are also drawn from and inspired by recorded history. Beanland says she decided to follow a 14-year-old stagehand, who played a role in setting the fire; a middle-aged widow of means, who is in the expensive (and hard-to-escape) box seats; a young, enslaved maid, who is sitting in the gallery, against her will; and a middle-aged, enslaved blacksmith, who runs to the building to help. ”For me, it is both a challenge and a treat to weave what I really did know about them into the larger, fictional narrative.”
In addition to these protagonists, the novel features a strong supporting cast of characters who are richly embodied by the author’s writing, as well as expert scene-setting in historic Richmond and surrounding areas that locals familiar with the area now will find especially interesting.
Embracing the language of the historical record and exploring the power of the pen, Beanland notes that she “played with syntax [and] … excerpted paragraphs from real inquest reports, newspaper articles, and fliers, so that readers have some sense of what the written word really sounded like two centuries ago.”
The novel interrogates a number of the power structures at work in Richmond at this time, teasing out some of the structural oppressions and horrors faced by enslaved Black men, women, and children, as well as women, generally, who lacked agency and were utterly reliant on husbands and fathers to make legal and medical decisions for them.
“It should be noted that I was also writing this book during the Black Lives Matter protests, and watching them play out in Richmond was not just an emotional experience but an educational one,” says Beanland. “Here I was, doing research on the lives of enslaved people living in the city in 1811, and at times, it felt like I could draw a straight line between what was happening in the city in the early 19th century and what was happening in the summer of 2020.”
In the four storylines that intermingle across the book, the author goes to great lengths to empower her main characters—each of whom is oppressed because of their race or gender—by celebrating their values and ethics, in the cases of Gilbert and Jack, or by filling gaps in the historical record with their speculative heroic actions, in the cases of Sally and Cecily.
Combining the historic record with empathetic characters whose traumas feel painfully contemporary at times, Beanland has crafted a novel that is a fast-paced and enthralling prompt to consider how we act in the face of tragedy.
“Life, in general, felt very fragile [in 2020], and I couldn’t help but channel a lot of my fears and anxieties into these characters, who are living through their own terrible ordeal,” she says. “Calamities—of all kinds—have a way of stripping us bare, of showing us what is essential, and of bringing out the very best and the very worst in us.”
