The late-Georgian stage is set for a fine gothic thriller, as a servant is dragged screaming from her blood-sodden mistress’s bed and arrested for the murders of her and the master of the house, who is splayed out on the floor downstairs. The accused, grief-stricken and protesting her innocence, is thrown into the filth of the nearest prison – and thereby hangs the entire tale.
Indeed, The Confessions of Frannie Langton, adapted by Sara Collins from her 2019 novel of the same name, is a fine gothic thriller. The mysterious murder is in place. There is Pooky Quesnel as the housekeeper Linux, who makes Mrs Danvers look like Amelia Bedelia. There is also a missing boy; hints of unspeakably loathsome practices in the background; and a slow-burning, illicit Sapphic relationship to leaven the mix without lowering the tension. And it is set in a firelit 1826.
But the tale quickly and satisfyingly deepens into so much more. The supposed murderer is the eponymous Frannie (Karla-Simone Spence), an enslaved woman from the plantations of Jamaica. Her surname is that of her master, John Langton (Steven Mackintosh, a splintery mass of resentments and insecurities that aggravate his inhumanity) who “gifts” the woman he has educated since childhood and used as a factotum to his fellow “man of science”, the soon-to-be-deceased George Benham (Stephen Campbell Moore, your go-to man for malevolent urbanity), and leaves without further word.
“Did you not know he was going to leave you here?” says the ginger-haired scullery maid Pru, with bright interest. Frannie, although a servant, has a sense of herself as an independent entity. Pru knows without question that she is not.
Frannie’s story unfolds across two timelines. In one, she is imprisoned and suffering from laudanum withdrawal, as well as the shocking loss of her lover, Marguerite Benham (the wife of George, played by Sophie Cooke); Frannie and her unsympathetic but professional lawyer William Pettigrew (Henry Pettigrew) try to find a way to stop her being hanged. In the other, her history unfolds: her life in Jamaica; how she came to be in England; and how and why each haunts the other.
What is common to both, which the series draws out beautifully, is the disfranchisement, the horrors large and small and the tyranny of others’ expectations and assumptions that have shaped Frannie’s life. (The scene in which George cuts off a lock of her hair overflows with unspoken threat, while the scene from her childhood of her mother deliberately distancing herself from her – presumably to try to save them both from the pain of the greater separation the woman knows must come – is awful.)
We see it first in the lawyer who asks Frannie if she knows what a brief is, then in the housekeeper who checks she knows how to use a spoon and makes her eat from a yellow bowl set aside from the rest of the household’s dishes. It is shown in more terrible ways as her backstory and the connection between her, Langton – whose papers about “the African’s” inferiority Linux takes great pleasure in reading aloud in the kitchen, so Frannie can hear – and Benham becomes clearer.
At the same time, Confessions is not, as Frannie says contemptuously in voiceover, addressing and excoriating our expectations, “just another one of those slave stories, all sugared over with misery and despair”. It is a love story, with Marguerite looking to escape her unhappy marriage and the two frustrated, “overeducated” women finding themselves in each other. But it is also simply Frannie’s story, of a fully rounded human being, neither a cipher nor a symbol, with faults and foibles, dignity, intellectual (if not much social) agency, wit and all the other things that make her a force to be reckoned with.
Like the book, the four-part drama is an examination of the dreadful power of narrative. Who gets to have their voice heard, who gets to tell their story and who must suffer having one imposed on and written for them – maybe even in “scientific” papers that people take as fact – are questions whose answers are shown to be more and more important as Frannie’s tale unfolds.
Confessions is also a showcase for the ways in which misogyny and race intertwine – Marguerite is not free, either, but her skin colour protects and privileges her at many turns. It also makes her blind to the ways in which she benefits from and perpetuates the system that does so much to degrade the woman she loves.
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But it is all wrapped up in a rich, compelling story that keeps tight hold of its plot and leaves you hoping, almost as ardently as Fannie, for justice to be done.
The Confessions of Frannie Langton aired on ITV1 and is available on ITVX.