why is there an old woman in a hanging cage for punishment keeping a journal written in blood candas jane dorsey has written an ambitious feminist novel about women coming to terms with their identity in a barbarous fantasy world dorseys women travel across the world from the slave dens to the merchant cities across seas by ship and by dirigible to isolated mountain villages and back again but there remains provocative ambiguity as the story progresses there is a woman exiled from her family a mother who has abandoned her daughter an old woman in a cage a young women slave on a lords estate who does not remember her past how many of them are the same woman