2021/006: Affinity -- Sarah Waters

The rain was fine — too fine to spoil the surface of the Thames, it shone like glass, and where the lamps of the bridges and the water-stairs showed there were wriggling snakes of red and yellow light. The pavements gleamed quite blue—like china plates. I should never have guessed that that dark night could have had so many colours in it.[loc. 4393]

Set in London in the 1870s, this is a compelling psychological drama centred on Margaret Prior, a middle-class lady who, after a nervous breakdown, becomes a prison visitor to the women's wing of the Millbank Penitentiary. Among the prisoners she encounters is Selina Dawes, spirit-medium, who is serving a sentence for fraud and assault. Still miserable and angry after the termination of a relationship with another woman, Margaret is drawn to Selina, who tells Margaret that they have an 'affinity', they belong together.

Interspersed with Margaret's first-person account are excerpts from Selina's diaries, from the time before her arrest when she was a successful medium. From the outset of the novel it's clear that things are not quite as cut-and-dried as they appear.

Or is it?

I began to understand, as I read Affinity, that two of the characters might possibly be the same person known by different names. I congratulated myself on my perspicacity. And then I finished the novel, and went to add it to LibraryThing, and realised that I'd read it 15 years ago ...

In hindsight it's not odd that I'd completely forgotten it: that was a strange time, with my father in his final months of life and me planning a move out of London that would end up being of longer duration than initially supposed. The life I had then was very different from the life I have now, and that's not simply because of the pandemic.

But I think I did retain some of the novel: the Impressionist images of the Thames at night, the dank prison (where the Tate stands now), the Crystal Palace lit up on its hill.

And I think, rereading my earlier review, I enjoyed the novel more this time around...

Original review from May 2005: since when a great deal has changed.

Read for the 'About incarceration' element of the Reading Women Challenge 2021.