First impressions review: Affinity, by Sarah Waters

 


            This wonderfully atmospheric book follows Margaret Prior, a young Victorian lady who is recovering from a bout of depression and anxiety. Because she’s been advised to find some activity to take her mind off things, she begins visiting the inmates of a women’s prison. She soon becomes magnetically drawn to an ethereal-looking girl named Selena Dawes, who was locked up after a séance went wrong. Selena tells her story both to Miss Prior and in diary entries from before she was imprisoned, noting: “Other girls seemed dull…of course, they thought me queer. I might meet someone, sometimes, and I would know they were like me. But that was no good, of course, if the person did not know it too – or worse, if she guessed at it and was afraid…” (Ha! I see what you did there, Ms. Waters). She eventually tells Miss Prior that they have an affinity that links them together on a spiritual level.

            The lesbian romance and yearning in this is real…but not quite in the way you’ll expect! I won’t say much more about the ending, because you should experience the way it unfolds for yourself. I will say this, though: the clues are all there, but because we only view events through the diaries of the two main characters, you will likely not put them all together until afterward. There is a person in this book who is a little bit evil but who I couldn’t help admiring for how effectively she uses the tools at her disposal to work toward the life she wants – well done, ma’am.

            Selina’s Spiritualist “powers” are a bit creepy; it is hard to be sure for most of the book whether she truly is talking to ghosts. But much of the horror comes from the literal and figurative prisons the women are in. Millbank is awful, of course – the extreme efforts to keep it clean and controlled being as terrible as the damp and the insects – but the reasons the inmates are there will also make you shiver. One, for instance, had tried to commit suicide multiple times and was confined for being a public nuisance - something which is definitely not going to help her mental state! Like others, she is essentially being punished for her class, as richer women are either not arrested for such things or are not forced to make such hard choices about how to make a living. That doesn’t mean such ladies are happy, though. Miss Prior’s own mental break occurred after a plan to go abroad with her father and the girl she loved fell apart due to the father’s death and the girl’s marriage to another member of the family. Now she feels the role of “old maid daughter”, doomed to stay at home forever with her meddlesome mother, closing in around her. It is perhaps this sense of being trapped that makes her feel such an immediate kinship with Selina.

Because I just had to look it up afterward: Millbank prison was a real place. As the novel notes, it was on the banks of the Thames and therefore very damp; cholera outbreaks led to several temporary closures. As described in the story, it was constructed as a panopticon, with towers in six pentagonal courtyards overlooking all the cells, and while some of the prisoners served their terms locally, some were being held before transportation to Australia. While the book shows it as having a male and female wing, by 1874 “the number of male convicts confined for any time in Millbank was dramatically reduced, in practice limited to who professed to be Roman Catholics and in the probationary class.” It was featured in Dickens’ ‘Bleak House’ and the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Sign of the Four’, which I suspect is how Waters learned of it, since there isn’t much left of it today.

 

Overall recommendation: Perfect creepy read for a damp fall or winter day, especially if you are someone who enjoys Poe or Dickens but wish they had more developed female characters.

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