Layered Silences and Ethical Limits of Recovery: Palimpsest, Epistemic Violence and Narrative Ethics in Maggie O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

Maggie O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2006) is about Esme who is confined to a psychiatric institution for sixty years by her family. With the postwar deinstitutionalisation policies that led to the closure of long-stay psychiatric hospitals, Iris, Esme’s next of kin, is contacted and asked to take responsibility for her. As she pieces together the past, Iris discovers that Esme is her biological grandmother, and that Kitty played a significant role in Esme’s institutionalisation. Although the novel is often read as a feminist recovery narrative that restores a silenced woman to family memory, this article suggests that O’Farrell challenges this presumption by demonstrating that the recovery itself has the potential to reproduce epistemic violence. Drawing on Sarah Dillon’s theorisation of the palimpsest and Gayatri Spivak’s concept of epistemic violence, the article presents an ethical paradox: Iris’s emergence as a narrative subject depends on the prior erasure of Esme, whose voice can never be fully restored without risking a repetition of the epistemic violence that silenced her. By foregrounding the complicity of recovery narratives in structures of epistemic violence, this article reframes contemporary women’s fiction as a site of critical self-reflexivity rather than as a narrative of closure.