BookBrowse Reviews A Private Man by Stephanie Sy-Quia

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The complex relationship between David, a priest, and Margaret, a theology professor, tests their faith, commitment, and dreams for the Catholic Church.

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It is 1963 when Margaret Bendelow is hired to teach theology at a women's college in England. Her cognitive skill and understanding of theological complexities are exemplary. Her academic depth is noteworthy. At the beginning of her career, the future seems too far away to contemplate—she'll be awash in dementia in 2019. The present is where she thrives. Margaret is excited about her appointment until she finds out she will be under the supervision of someone named Father Fletcher. She resents having to prove her credibility when she has studied at Regina Mundi, a college that teaches laywomen theology.

The shaping of Margaret as a woman of wit and lofty dreams, of desires and frustrations, is the complicated task Stephanie Sy-Quia eagerly takes on, inspired by her grandparents' forbidden love story. Her first novel A Private Man builds its beautiful arc with both refined prose and character depth. Sy-Quia illustrates how Margaret is exhausted by the Catholic Church as a patriarchal institution, how it romanticizes devotion and prayer but diminishes service by women and female leadership; that's what she can't tolerate despite living her faith. After she arrives at the women's college she registers for the birth control pill, despite the doctor's bold stare at her empty ring finger, his eyes rebuking her as if she has already sinned, but Margaret refuses to be shamed about liking sex. The pill is social freedom.

The man overseeing her class, David Fletcher, is attractive and young, she guesses around forty years old. She has always been suspicious of attractive men but he has calluses on his hands that seem to imply he is familiar with physical labor.

David has been a priest for over a decade. For such a young man, his eyes are weary, though his strong voice carries easily in the wind. Beneath those marks of masculinity on his hands is a quiet loneliness, years in the making, from the war, and what he saw there, and from the sacrifices of the priesthood. Mostly, he trusts the company of men, assuming what he is feeling inside of himself is inside of them too, this unexplainable longing for the unknown and the road not taken.

On Margaret's first class day, David sits in the very back. She is a little late, her hair in a tidy bun, and the first thing she does is insist the students not stand when she enters the room. She advises them to call her Margaret and not Miss Bendelow.

"I am here to teach you theology. You do not know how lucky you are…Together we have the opportunity to study moral theology, dogmatics and the liturgy!... I have just come from Rome and let me tell you there is a revolution afoot."

"Father Fletcher and I will be meeting over the next few days," Margaret tells the students, "but the aim is to turn you out as thinking Catholics by the end of it."

If Margaret is surprised by her attraction to David, and his fascination with her, she doesn't let it dissuade her from her role as professor. But outside of class she and David are charmed by their Catholic differences.

Margaret converted to Catholicism during a terrible time—her mother died, her married lover, a man named Tristan, excitedly announced his wife was pregnant. Catholicism was the family religion of her best friend Nicole. Converting was an informed choice. She liked the order of Catholic rituals, their structure. Advent. Lent. Easter. The money Margaret inherited from her parents allowed her freedom to pursue her interests in Rome.

For David, Catholicism "was in him like marrow, he had drawn it all up, into all the coursing paths of his self." It "could never be rooted out." David has given everything up in his service to God and Margaret has given nothing up in her analytical devotion to God. Their burgeoning friendship can't expunge the gap between what being a Catholic priest cost him and what being a Catholic theologian anointed within her.

Their academic arguments about gender norms and the patriarchal foundation of the priesthood often annoy Margaret as she vehemently disagrees with David's rote answer "because the Apostles were men." An intellectual, with a spicy wit, Margaret explores the why of things and wants reasoned answers while David spouts out what he has learned in seminary without much thought. He is a priest by profession and by soul. Priests are conformists beholden to an ancient written text with passages burned in their memory. By nature, their valorization of the past is a professional ethic.

Margaret and David's conversations aren't exclusive to Catholicism. They discuss everything from wine to the Mediterranean to cherries. They dine together, smile at one another, and pretend their closeness lacks intimacy.

One of my favorite passages is when they spar over the marriage of priests. It is Margaret's amazing brain that quietly seduces David even as he argues that celibacy is the practical way for priests to practice sublimation (the transformation of desire). Margaret's response is humanistic. "Religion," she says, "gives us the concept of daily life, and a way of handling its tediums, and marriage is one of its great means. Marriage is a mode of witness, an epistemology. To bar people from marriage is to prevent them from this way of knowing."

"Knowing" is such an interesting word. It's rooted in identity and you see that here, where the older version of Margaret suffers cognitive decay; she can't know yesterday and her self-worth plummets. The younger Margaret knows history, truth, theology, and life but can't know tomorrow, which feeds into her curious spirit and adventurous nature. The question the novel asks of its readers travels much deeper, however: can Margaret know love when it falls, accidentally, outside traditional boundaries?

As I was reading A Private Man I wondered if it was secular enough considering certain audiences are uncomfortable with religious frameworks. Novels have this amazing ability to transcend our regular lives but the introduction of religious themes, for some, is reductive. But I found the Catholic framing of the novel intriguing. I am not Catholic and it allowed me entrance into a room that is normally closed off. I loved the passage where Margaret is studying at Regina Mundi and she is in the washroom doing laundry when a bundle of vestments arrives. What is a chore is also an art, a duty of love.

"Quickly, the most senior washerwoman was called over, to take it on. Margaret watched as she laid the garment flat on a worktable, filled a small basin with the mildest water, got out a fresh bar of soap from a box high on a shelf, lined with glassine paper, then spread the chasuble over her knees and dabbed at the stains."

There is a difference between an easy read and a quick read. A Private Man is neither. As a novel, it asks for time. It asks its readers to live within its breathable boundaries of religion and absence. The writing is so beautiful the last thing you want to do is rush through it and yet you want to rush through it to see if David abandons the priesthood because he is in love with Margaret more than he is in love with the Church. The emotional weight of the secularity—God can be love, but love can also be love—registers quietly. Stephanie Sy-Quia has built a world within a world that readers enter and don't want to leave, that is partly biographical, and perhaps that's why it feels so personal, and that's why I read it one more time before ordering it for my mother, an Episcopal priest.

This review first ran in the May 20, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.