Miss Madeleine Silvester, the girl in the sitting with Selina who is witnessed as being hysterical by Mrs. It is heavily implied that she and Margaret shared an inappropriate level of intimacy prior to the novel's plot and Magaret's suicide attempt. The more I tried to give up thinking of her, the more I said to myself, 'She's nothing to you', the harder I tried to pluck the idea of her out of my heart, the more she stayed there.

She masterfully creates an atmosphere of suffocating melancholy and builds the tension to an almost unbearable point, so that when the characters finally break, there is a blessed emotional release and relief in the confusion and madness that follows. The little stranger” is an old-fashioned expression found in maternity manuals for an unborn child, and she was drawn to the darker implication “that it’s like a thing that you might give birth to that’s not a child, some more troubling emanation”. Following a failed suicide attempt, a young "lady visitor" named Margaret Prior develops a relationship with an inmate named Selina Dawes in a Victorian women's prison, and both their lives are forever changed by their acquaintance. Her hands opened, she raised them to her cheek, and I caught a flash of colour against the pink of her work-roughened palms. Each narrator has a different style, but both delve equally into events and their resulting feelings.Priscilla "Pris" Prior, Margaret's younger sister who is due to be married at the start of the novel. Waters however goes the full Gothic both indulging the reader in what might be a supernatural mystery and providing ultimately rational explanations for the strangeness, the explanations stretched my credulity more than the idea of believing in the spirit world, but I believe that is part of the gothic convention too anyhow in for a penny, in for a pound, and the same sex love element puts me in mind of Horace Walpole who is the starting point for the British gothic novel iirc . I hate to ask it, because he is supposed to have TV's Midas Touch, but is Andrew Davies entering 'Emperor's New Clothes' territory?

I had more or less to figure the book out as I went along – a very time-consuming and unnerving experience for me, as I tried out scenes and chapters in lots of different ways. The only truly linear aspect of her narrative is her ever more ambitious subject matter, and continuing rise.As when one adds salt to a tumbler of water, there comes a point where simply no more will be absorbed.