About Maybelle Wallis
Maybelle is a graduate of St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College, University of London. A paediatrician who spent much of her career in England, she now works in Ireland.
Her debut novel HEART of CRUELTY won ‘Meet the Publisher’ at the 2020 Wexford Literary Festival, and was published by Poolbeg. Its sequel, The PIANO PLAYER, came out in 2022. The third book in The DOUGHTY TRILOGY is DAUGHTER of STRANGERS, published in 2024.
The DOUGHTY TRILOGY
Drawing inspiration from the former workhouse buildings at the hospitals where she has practised, and from the history of how medicine evolved during the Victorian era, Maybelle evokes a past in The DOUGHTY TRILOGY that holds a mirror to the present. She believes that times may change, but human nature does not.
Set in Birmingham, England, in 1840, HEART of CRUELTY addresses the key question raised by contemporary #MeToo cases: how can abuse survivors get a fair hearing? In her novel, Maybelle uses the stark inequalities of the 19th century to highlight the misogyny and self-interest that silence disclosures of abuse. Yet she also shows how the Victorian age was a time of progress, when forensic medicine overcame superstition in the coroners’ courts and a belief in universal rights and the accountability of people in authority emerged.
From her experience of investigating child protection cases as a paediatrician, Maybelle believes that a key characteristic of all forms of abuse is the abuse of power. So, against a backdrop of criminal acts waiting to be exposed, HEART of CRUELTY is a love story in which the passion is perilous because the man wields power. This is a fault-line in many romances, from Mr Darcy and Mr Rochester to the billionaire novels of the modern age. Can it be overcome?
Maybelle wrote The PIANO PLAYER during the COVID- 19 pandemic to explore how plagues overturn lives, when combined with a lack of social justice and the loss of the political will to fight. During the Great Famine in Ireland the potato blight and epidemic disease combined with an unjust administration to kill around one million people and drive another million to emigrate.
The PIANO PLAYER is set in Dublin in 1849, a city packed with refugees from the Great Famine, a chaos in which malignant forces operate: addiction, medical malpractice, rack-renting, and radicalisation. Yet amongst the ruins remains the hope that something can be salvaged and a lost love can find new life.
Maybelle closes the trilogy with DAUGHTER of STRANGERS which explores how we reconcile past trauma. The setting switches to the new world of Manhattan in 1854 where our characters have emigrated to find progress and prosperity, yet are haunted by their memories of the Famine years and must reckon with the sin and shame of the past before they can find happiness.
The choice between conciliation and revenge is one with which, in this era of rising conflict, humankind is doomed to grapple. It is a political dilemma that is also profoundly personal for traumatised people. In DAUGHTER of STRANGERS Maybelle, confronting her own childhood trauma, interprets this conflict at the individual level.
Poignant and suspenseful, The DOUGHTY TRILOGY transports the reader back into the past yet poses questions that resonate with the problems of today.