A Spell of Winter: WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

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One of the most beautiful women ever to grace the silver screen, Hedy Lamarr also designed a secret weapon against Nazi Germany. This novel is set in England in the era of World War I. The war starts later in the novel, which was the first clue to the time in which the story is set. Cathy and her brother Rob live on a rural estate with their grandfather. Their mother abandoned her family and left for warmer parts of Europe. Their father's health declined after this and he was eventually committed to a sanatorium where he died. The siblings are left to their own devices with only an unlikeable governess, and a single servant to see to their needs. Scenes of madness are prominent plot devices in this novel. From the helpless father to the domineering governess, or even the exuberant Mr. Bullivant, the reader encounters off-kilter behavior. Give examples of when Cathy's sanity could be called into question. Which characters are the most stable? Which character is accused of madness without the reader experiencing it firsthand? This book is something very unusual. The title is fitting for an often chilling story that casts a spell on the willing reader.

There is a war mentioned in this book and while they don't actually name the war at all, I'm guessing it may be world war one?? But as I read, bits of the setting and characters started to come together, particularly the narrator Catherine. Once I got a feel for her, the book took off and became an enjoyable, compulsive read for me to the end. During the 1980s and early 1990s I taught poetry and creative writing, tutored residential writing courses for the Arvon Foundation and took part in the Poetry Society's Writer in Schools scheme, as well as giving readings and workshops in schools, hospitals, prisons and every other kind of place where a poem could conceivably be welcome. I also taught at the University of Glamorgan, the University of Bristol's Continuing Education Department and for the Open College of the Arts. Comparing herself to the beautiful Livvy, a dowdier Cathy thinks: "I was too like my mother. My face made people think of the things men and women did together in the dark" (p. 66). What does she mean? What kind of face forces people into shame? Contrast this with the shame that Miss Gallagher attempts to stir up in people. Catherine and her brother Rob grow up on a large but failing English country estate owned by their grandfather. They have been abandoned by their parents and raised by a servant not much older than them, Kate. The siblings’ relationship is both disturbing and tender, both outrageous and relatable. WWI is brewing, but the household dramas take center stage.

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There’s an intense scene in the book after which Catherine is unsure of what really happened. The writing reflects that kind of state of mind: an uncertainty as to what is real and what is imagined. Poetry was very important to me from childhood. I began by listening to and learning by heart all kinds of rhymes and hymns and ballads, and then went on to make up my own poems, using the forms I’d heard. Writing these down came a little later. This novel was the first winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996. I bought it after the book blogger Simon Savidge and his wonderful mother, Louise Savidge, started reading past winners of the Women's Prize for Fiction. The Orange Prize became the Bailey's Prize in 2012 and after 2017, the Women's Prize for Fiction. For the past two years, I have read a number of the longlisted titles, and look forward to the nominations and awards.

Set largely in the build up to WWI, the story is narrated by Catherine, a young woman who feels increasingly cut off from the outside world. Abandoned by her mother as a child, embarrassed by the mental breakdown of her father that led to his hospitalisation, and ignored by the grandfather who finds too much pain in her resemblance to his absent daughter, she clings to her brother, Rob, for comfort. Hunkering down for the winter in their secluded, crumbling mansion, their mutual misplaced need for love takes their relationship down a dark and dangerous path that will pit them against the few who remain close to them. I wonder sometimes if it’s the people themselves who keep you company, or the idea of them. The idea you have of them.”Out of curiosity, after I'd finished the book I read WITH YOUR CROOKED HEART, Dunmore's latest. Although some of the same themes surface --- particularly the absent mother --- and there is a continuing taste for the macabre, Dunmore doesn't overdo her effects or use more words than she has to. Her people, instead of having to fight their way out of encumbering gothic stereotypes, are fully themselves --- sympathetic despite addiction, brutality, dishonesty, pain --- from the start. And the suspense is terrific.

A few relatively normal characters keep the novel grounded: There is the eccentric grandfather with whom the children live, their mother having long ago fled to the Continent and their father having eventually died in the sanatorium. There is Kate, the Irish maid of all work, the anti-Miss Gallagher, the good servant as opposed to the bad. And there is the Austen-esque figure of their wealthy neighbor, Mr. Bullivant, who woos Cathy in a discreet fashion, sends her lemons from his Italian villa, teaches her about painting --- and, most importantly, knows and likes her errant mother. (This mother-daughter relationship seems to possess Dunmore, as if she is trying to work out something in her own life.) Dunmore is a lovely lyrical writer and the book is strangely affecting. It’s about a young woman, her brother, and a strange life with absent parents and the odd characters who are there in their place. In a review in The Washington Post, American writer and academic Nicholas Delbanco described A Spell of Winter as "an erotic pastoral". [3] He said it is "heady Gothic stuff" reminiscent of Brontë's Wuthering Heights. A less experienced author may have turned this into a "romantic melodrama", but Delbanco stated that Dunmore's "authoritative telling" has produced a "haunt[ing]" tale. [3]Her most recent prize shortlisting, in 2006, was for the Nestlé Smarties book prize for children's fiction, with The Tide Knot, the second volume in a quartet of children's novels set, like Zennor, on the glittering, mysterious Cornish coast. The move into adult fiction in no way derailed her desire to write for children; in fact, she says, "It's something that's actually become more important in the last half-dozen years. Children are a completely different audience, and I enjoy that. There's something about the way they devour books that's wonderful; you don't get many fans of adult fiction sending you beautiful drawings of your characters. And it frees you to layer on the suspense and narrative drama – to create lots of worlds, real and unreal, and move into them. But at the same time, it's just the same as adult fiction in terms of the emotions. It's not milk and water." Did it take chutzpah, to put words in the mouth of one of her literary heroes? Not really, she says: their story needed to be told. "We know the bare bones of what happened – but what was it like for him and Frieda in this landscape? The details intrigued me: Lawrence creating a garden, growing things like salsify, getting in tons of manure. He knew how to do practical things – the ironing, the washing – and his combination of day-to-day good sense and the life of the mind fascinated me. I felt there were some interesting things about that particular period and about what turned him against England." Both servants fiercely guard the mysteries of the family heritage from Rob and Cathy. This inverts common behavior, resulting in outsiders who are better informed about the family than the family itself. What effect does this have on Cathy? Rob? The novel takes place at the turn-of-the-century, when modernization is beginning to sweep across Europe. Confronted with new comforts like indoor heating at Ash Court, Cathy thinks: "I wondered if I would miss our alternations of roasting and shivering, which were as natural to us as the squeeze and swell of our hearts" (p. 80). How does this call into question the very idea of what is "natural"? Consider how modernization has changed, and sanitized, our subjection to bodily functions. Do you think this displacement makes it difficult for characters in a modern setting to have the same Gothic sensibilities as those of characters in A Spell of Winter? No,' I said, my mind full of the blind, skinny leverets, 'she won't have any young. It's the wrong time.'