Caro Claire Burke’s Thriller Captures a Tradwife’s Quiet Discontent

In Yesteryear, an influencer wakes up in the nineteenth century to find it’s nothing like Instagram.

In her 2001 memoir, A Life’s Work, Rachel Cusk writes that “in motherhood, a woman exchanges her public significance for a range of private meanings.” Cusk’s feelings of invisibility and loneliness were met with relentless criticism. “I was accused of child-hating,” Cusk recounts, “of postnatal depression, of shameless greed, of irresponsibility, of pretentiousness, of selfishness, of doom-mongering, and, most often, of being too intellectual.” Many readers critiqued Cusk’s desire to make those private meanings legible, digestible, even to the extent these struggles were shared.

It might seem strange that the literary, Oxford-educated Cusk would belong in such close proximity to the figure of the internet “tradwife,” but both court controversy for mothering out loud. The tradwife, short for “traditional wife,” is a married mother of, usually, several children, whose baking, cooking, gardening, and home duties are boundless but elegantly executed, making for inspiring, infuriating social media content. Her husband might be a man in finance, or he might spend his days managing a cattle farm. What he does is irrelevant, and, to an extent, what she does is less revealing than what she doesn’t do. The tradwife doesn’t have a full-time job outside the home; she doesn’t mess around with processed foods; she probably doesn’t send her kids to public school; she doesn’t fight her husband to “wear the pants,” since she’s happy in her gingham nap dress.

The tradwife projects conservative values but in a wildly incoherent way, once you consider that acting the part of the perfectly old-fashioned housewife is her full-time social media–enabled job: Would a truly “traditional” wife insert herself into the public square this way, propping up a lucrative persona with a prop-husband and prop-kids? How often are these “traditional” rural paradises being subsidized, even bankrolled entirely, by fat cat fathers-in-law and conservative lobbying groups? (The answer is: a lot.) Hannah Neeleman, a Juilliard-trained ballet dancer turned trad-mother of nine, attracted scorn, sympathy, then scorn again, from readers of her 2024 New York Times profile, who had plenty to say about her husband’s considerable family fortune. But, in an attention economy, disgust and admiration are worth the same dollar amount. It’s all engagement, mama.

As an influencer’s identity online threatens to overtake her responsibilities off camera, she becomes an unreliable narrator, the novelist Adriane Leigh has written in CrimeReads. The mystique and duplicity of the tradwife have precipitated a cycle of popular fiction, many of these novels skewing toward the mystery or thriller genres. These include Saratoga Schaefer’s Trad Wife, Jo Piazza’s Everyone Is Lying to You, Liane Child’s The Trad Wife’s Secret, and, now, Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear.

Yesteryear is not really a thriller, though it is thrilling, and it is not a mystery novel, though the action revolves around a singular puzzle: How did Natalie Heller Mills, one of the world’s most (in)famous tradwife influencers, wake up one morning to find herself not in her modern-day, renovated farmhouse but on a nineteenth-century farm, with zero amenities and nonstop toil? How did she get here, and how the hell is she going to get back?

The extremely online will not be shocked by Yesteryear’s revelations: that the tradwife is phony, that her life is a sham, and so on. But the character of Natalie, shrewd and indelibly observant, speaks with an idiosyncratic voice that takes the reader on a turbulent tour of women’s rage throughout history. A college-age Natalie scours the internet forums, encountering questions such as Why do modern women hate themselves so........

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