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Authors: Sarah Waters

Affinity

Affinity
Sarah Waters
Penguin (2002)
Rating:
****
Tags:
Ghost, Historical fiction, Millbank Penitentiary (London; England), Social Science, London (England), Penology, General, Romance, Suspense, Historical, Thrillers, Women prisoners, Fiction, Occult & Supernatural

Amazon.com Review

Affinity
is a tale of power and possession that Henry James himself might admire. In her first novel, __, Sarah Waters explored secrets and longing--capping off this lesbian romp with a utopian-socialist vision. Her intricate follow-up is just as sensual but infinitely darker, its moral more difficult to descry. Its stylistic and psychological rewards, however, are visible at every turn, the author's persuasive imagination matched by her gift for storytelling.

In late September 1874, Margaret Prior makes her way through the pentagons of London's Millbank Prison, a place of fearful symmetry and endless corridors. This plain woman on the verge of 30 has come to comfort those behind bars, several of whom Waters brings to instant, sad life. And our Lady Visitor plans to take her role dead seriously, having recovered from two years of nervous indolence in her family's Chelsea house. One person, however, makes her job a passion. Opening an inspection slit (or "eye" as these devices are known), Margaret hears "a
perfect
sigh, like a sigh in a story." Peering inward, she's confronted by the most erotic of visions--a woman turned toward the sun, caressing her cheek with a forbidden violet: "As I watched, she put the flower to her lips, and breathed upon it, and the purple of the petals gave a quiver and seemed to glow..."

Selina Dawes may indeed have the face of a Crivelli angel, but this medium is in for fraud and assault, her last session having gone very badly indeed. Suffice it to say that the first full encounter between these two very different women is enthralling. "You think spiritualism a kind of fancy," Selina riddles. "Doesn't it seem to you, now you are here, that
anything
might be real, since Millbank is?" And soon enough Margaret receives several viable signs of the supernatural: a locket disappears from her room, flowers mysteriously appear, and her dazzling friend knows everything about her. Strangest of all, Selina seems to love her.

As Margaret records her weekly prison forays, her own past comes into focus, notably her plans to travel to Italy with her first love (who is now her sister-in-law). But her current journal, she convinces herself, is to be very different from her last one, which "took as long to burn as human hearts, they say, do take." Meanwhile, Waters offers a narrative two-for-one, placing Margaret's diary cheek by jowl with Selina's chronicle of her pre-Millbank existence. This dispassionate, staccato record initially suggests that we can separate truth from desire. Or can we? What Waters's haunting creation leaves us with is a more painful reality--that knowledge and belief are entirely different things.
--Kerry Fried

From

Her first,
Tipping the Velvet
, was good; her second is just terrific. Moody, haunting, and haunted (it's about love among Victorian spiritualists),
Affinity
is two parts Wilkie Collins, with whose
The Woman in White
it shares an obsession with prisons, madness, journal-keeping, and elaborate, carefully engineered deceits; and just a dash of Jeanette Winterson for up-to-the-minute lesbian-historical-fiction flavor. ("He, she--you ought to know that in the spheres there are no differences like that.")

Table of Contents

 

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

 

Part One

24 September 1874

2 September 1872

30 September 1874

30 September 1872

4 October 1872

2 October 1874

6 October 1874

12 October 1872

15 October 1874

16 October 1874

3 November 1872

6 November 1872

13 November 1872

17 November 1872

17 October 1874

25 November 1872

21 October 1874

26 November 1872

 

Part Two

23 October 1874

9 December 1872

28 October 1874

17 December 1872

19 December 1872

8 January 1873

2 November 1874

25 January 1873

26 January 1873

 

Part Three

5 November 1874

10 November 1874

14 November 1874

20 November 1874

10 March 1873

21 November 1874

23 November 1874

24 November 1874

2 April 1873

28 November 1874

2 December 1874

26 May 1873

11 December 1874

30 May 1873

 

Part Four

21 December 1874

23 December 1874

24 December 1874

6 January 1875

14 June 1873

21 June 1873

25 June 1873

3 July 1873

15 January 1875

16 January 1875

19 January 1875

20 January 1875

 

Part Five

21 January 1875

18 July 1873

1 August 1873

 

Acknowledgements

Also by Sarah Waters

 

Tipping the Velvet

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

RIVERHEAD BOOKS
a member of
Penguin Putnam Inc.
375 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014

 

Copyright © 1999 by Sarah Waters.

 

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not
be reproduced in any form without permission.
Published simultaneously in Canada

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Waters, Sarah, date.
Affinity / by Sarah Waters.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-05311-9

1. Millbank Penitentiary (London, England)—History—19th
century—Fiction. 2. Women prisoners—England—London—
Fiction. 3. London (England)—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6073.A828 A-087554
823’.914—dc21

 

 

 

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

http://us.penguingroup.com

To Caroline Halliday

3 August 1873

I was never so frightened as I am now. They have left me sitting in the dark, with only the light from the window to write by. They have put me in my own room, they have locked the door on me. They wanted Ruth to do it, but she would not. She said ‘What, do you want me to lock up my own mistress, who has done nothing?’ In the end the doctor took the key from her & locked the door himself, then made her leave me. Now the house is full of voices, all saying my name. If I close my eyes & listen it might be any ordinary night. I might be waiting for Mrs Brink to come & take me down to a dark circle, & Madeleine or any girl might be there, blushing, thinking of Peter, of Peter’s great dark whiskers & shining hands.

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