Book Review: The House Is on Fire by Rachel Beanland

Book #112 of 2023:

The House Is on Fire by Rachel Beanland

A fascinating work of historical fiction about the Richmond Theatre fire, a now-obscure tragedy that in 1811 became our young nation’s first national news story about an event of such mass casualties. 72 people died in the flames, including the sitting governor of Virginia, and author Rachel Beanland has done a great job with the available archive material to flesh out this plausible account of the night and its aftermath. (I particularly appreciate that she places the fire itself fairly early in the narrative — not so much tracing the journeys that terminated there in some dramatic climax, but instead exploring the slower and sadder ramifications that followed for the community and a few specific individuals who survived.)

The greatest triumph of the book is in its reading between the lines of the official records to carefully prod at that received history, like questioning why three-quarters of the dead were women and if perhaps the fleeing men left their partners behind in the chaos. Several of Beanland’s viewpoint figures are enslaved persons, and she writes with deep empathy of how the regular abuses they already suffered would have been compounded and catalyzed by this new trauma — and by the theatre owners’ attempts to blame their own stagehand’s mishap on a fictitious slave revolt. She also mentions in an afterword the intriguing detail that contemporary reports suspected some folks who went missing that evening simply took the opportunity to flee for their freedom. And although her story dramatizes one such attempt, it likewise emphasizes how the horrors of slavery continued on unchanged for most in the wake of the affair.

This was my first real exposure to the Richmond disaster, and I’m sure that the writer has tweaked certain hopefully-small details to better suit the needs of her novel’s plot. But it’s immersive and clearly well-researched, and it closes with a bibliography of suggested nonfiction on the subject. So I’m overall glad she’s brought the tale to life this way and allowed it to once more reach a wide audience.

[Content warning for rape, incest, pedophilia, domestic abuse, racism, sexism, and antisemitism.]

★★★★☆

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