| ESTRANGED from her family and from her past
by a horrifying episode which she has buried for twenty-five years, Nancy
Brewster survives as a triumphant hermit in her old family home on New
England's North Shore, above Boston.
The novel opens when Nancy is beginning to find her lonely life intolerable.
Justification must be made for her situation, the past opened up. Looking
over her shoulder with a sense of disquieting intimacy, we travel back
into an agonised girlhood of suppressed memories, an impulsive marriage
and a disastrous friendship with Isabel March, one of the most memorably
evil creations in fiction. Relentlessly, events unfold towards a terrifying
climax while modern parallels quietly come into into view.
Is Isabel the monster perceived by Nancy, or does the truth lie in
Nancy's inadmissable, fiercely denied madness? Does Nancy's seemingly artless
journal lead us to the truth, or is it a last attempt to defend an unforgivable
crime?
Taking us from the century's opening years up to the summer of 1939,
this powerful and enthralling novel is loosely based on the sinister events
which took place when Robert Graves and Laura Riding, two passionate and
self-engrossed poets, left Europe to spend a summer with a young couple
they had never previously met. Writing the biography of Graves, Miranda
Seymour noted that this was an episode `so extraordinary, so bizarre that
it seems more suited to fiction.' This, a work of imagination, is the unforgettable
result of that observation.
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