Justine had always been told that her mother came from royal blood. The proof could be found in her mother’s elegance, her upper crust London accent—and in a cryptic letter hinting at her claim to a country estate. But beneath the polished veneer lay a fearsome, unpredictable temper that drove Justine from home the moment she was old enough to escape. When her mother sent her an envelope filled with secrets from the past, Justine buried it in the back of an old filing cabinet.
Years later, while overcome with crippling grief after her mother’s death, Justine found herself drawn back to that envelope. Its contents revealed a mystery that stretched back to the early years of World War II and beyond, into the dark corridors of the Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children, also known as the Foundling Hospital. It was there that Justine’s mother, known at the time as Dorothy Soames, bravely withstood years of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of a sadistic headmistress—a resilient child who dreamed of escape as German bombers rained death from the skies.
Established in the 18th century, the Foundling Hospital was Britain’s first secular charity. Its mission was to save “bastard” children from certain death or a life confined to London’s streets, but the thousands who grew up there were committed to a dismal existence, scrubbing floors and cleaning chamber pots for Britain’s ruling class, or sent to war to defend a nation that viewed them as disposable. From its role in the development of solitary confinement and human medical experimentation to the creation of The British Museum and The Royal Academy of Arts, the Hospital’s influence on Western culture reverberates still.
Justine’s clear-eyed prose carries readers back and forth from her own childhood, to her mother’s time as a Foundling, and to the present as she confronts dark family secrets. With heartbreaking honesty, she writes about the last moments she spent with her dying mother, before she knew of the brave Dorothy Soames. “It is lonely to have no love for one’s mother,” she says.
Justine Cowan is an attorney and environmentalist who spent over two decades exposing corporate corruption and holding polluters accountable. A graduate of UC Berkeley and Duke University School of Law, she lives with her husband in Atlanta, Georgia. The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames is her first book.
This virtual event is free and open to the public. The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames is available for purchase online at A Cappella Books.
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