The heartbreak left in the wake of the Terra Nova

The story of the five women waiting at home for Captain Scott and his doomed polar party is naturally occluded in tragedy. In this engaging book Katherine MacInnes for the first time presents them – two mothers at the outset, and three wives – as distinct individuals, separated one from the other by class, education, faith and temperament.

Kathleen Scott, the leader’s wife, was a gifted, confident sculptor with a lively social set and a house on Buckingham Palace Road. Caroline Oates, the widowed mother of the saturnine, Eton-educated cavalry officer Laurie (‘I dislike Scott intensely’), was the wealthy owner of Gestingthorpe Hall in Essex. The Scottish widow Emily Bowers, once a missionary teacher, was devoted to her only son Henry ‘Birdie’ Bowers, a naval officer and, at 28, the youngest of the polar party. Oriana ‘Ory’ Wilson, a vicar’s daughter, was the devout, childless wife of Edward ‘Bill’ Wilson, head of science on Scott’s team and the most significant confidant the captain ever had. Lois Evans had married Edgar ‘Taff’ Evans, a huge, thirsty petty officer from Rhossili on the Gower peninsula who had served with Scott on the 1901-5 Discovery expedition. (Lois was an English-speaking Conformist, which meant Church not Chapel.)

MacInnes, whose first book was a biography of Ory Wilson (Woman with the Iceberg Eyes, 2019), interleaves the stories of the two sets of five, and of the individuals within the sets. She has produced an elegant, densely textured work, like a tapestry, arranging the material over three parts. The first takes the story to the Cape Evans hut during the first Antarctic winter of 1910. The second ends with the expedition reaching New Zealand early in 1913 with its baleful news. The third covers the aftermath.