Have I told you the Hole in the Wall Gang is all women dressed in men’s clothes who train themselves to walk and sound like men? (I wonder what Freud would have said about that?) Both parties take bullets: the followers, when shot, are killed the women being pursued take wounds that Ada can fix without trouble. There are the stock posse-in-pursuit situations. Killing people who resist is ‘just part of the job’. The Gang makes its living by stealing and on-selling prize horses, by sticking-up coaches and the occasional bank.

We have other female characters whose individuality is lost. She becomes annoyed when anyone else has the Kid’s attention. The situation is: we have the leader of the Gang, the Kid, who spouts obscure passages from scripture for no discernible purpose Cassie who has spent more time than the others with the Kid and has the hots for her. Ada meets Agnes Rose, Cassie, Texas, Faith, Elzy and God knows who else. She discovers one of Shakespeare’s favourite scenes, care-free country folk, decked in flowers, dancing and singing in the presence of their leader, the Kid. Having been abandoned in the darkness Ada pushes through some major scrub before being rescued by the sound of a fiddle. And other people won’t be safe from you” (44). The Mother Superior extends herself in protecting eighteen-year-old women in her charge to caution, “If you go up to Hole in the Wall, you won’t be safe anymore. However, our heroine Ada wants to expand her knowledge of medicine as it applies to women and persuades the Mother Superior to allow her to travel (unsupervised) with a travelling bookseller into the wilds to join the Hole in the Wall Gang. In less serious cases, the usual cliché of banishing a socially isolated woman to a convent follows. Thus, Anna North paints a picture of a society dominated by men. (Historical accuracy is a casualty, a fatality, in this book).

Rumour is sufficient for a charge of practising witchcraft, for which the penalty is death by hanging. Failure to produce a child in a reasonable time carries the consequence of divorce and social disfavour. Ada lives under a law that requires young women marry and have children. Outlawed is set in 1894 in an unidentified State of the USA.

Outlawed by Anna North