A Spell of Winter
Author: Helen Dunmore
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.
Cover Description
Unsettling love and stifled horror create and then destroy the claustrophobic world of this lush, literary gothic set in turn-of-the-century England. Catherine and Rob Allen, siblings two years apart, grow up in a world of shameful secrets. Their mother creates a public outcry, abandoning her family for a bohemian life on the Continent. Their father, whose mental state always has been slightly precarious, is committed to an asylum in the country. The children are sealed off with their grandfather in a crumbling country estate accompanied by their sturdy and well-loved servant, Kate, and the predatory tutor, Miss Gallagher. In true gothic fashion, terror, violence and eroticism collect beneath every dark surface. Against this strange and secretive backdrop, Cathy and Rob develop a closeness so fierce that it eventually threatens to smother them both. Kate makes the first crack in their hermetically sealed world, which World War I eventually bursts wide open. With Kate's departure for Canada and Rob's for the front, destitute times at home force Cathy into self-reliance. It's only after she's redeemed by hardship that she's given a second chance to be redeemed by love.
TL;DR Review
A Spell of Winter is an eerie gothic novel set in the lead-up to WWI. It has a pretty goodplot line and absolutely excellent prose.
For you if: You like slightly unsettling, dark books and historical fiction.
Full Review
“You have to keep on with a house, day after day, I think. Heating, cleaning, opening and closing windows, making sounds to fill the silence, cooking and washing up, laundering and polishing. As soon as you stop, there may as well never have been any life at all. A house dies as quickly as a body.”
A Spell of Winter was the first-ever winner of (what’s now called) the Women’s Prize for Fiction — in 1996 — and so it’s first up on this year’s #ReadingWomen challenge. I read it in one day (call it a Sunday during social distancing), which made for quite the interesting experience.
This is a gothic novel, which basically means it’s got creepy, dark undertones. A Spell of Winter also has major Wuthering Heights vibes with a headstrong protagonist named Cathy living in a giant, dilapidated house. In this book, Cathy and her brother, Rob, grew up with only one another — their mother fled the life she felt was trapping her, and their father was sent to live in a sanatorium, where he eventually died. This leads them to become … far too close. Which then, as you can imagine, has a serious ripple effect through the rest of her life.
I’ve never read any of Helen Dunmore’s work before, but I can see why her books were so successful. Her prose is absolutely amazing — in so few words, she makes you see, hear, taste, smell every tiny detail. It’s hypnotic, actually. And it’s not dense. It flows like music.
As for the story, it definitely feels like a classic — in that you understand its weight and appreciate what it’s doing more than you love it. For me, the middle section of this book was actually pretty engrossing — Cathy is spiraling and spiraling and you’re right there spiraling with her. I just felt like the height of the action dropped off too soon, leaving the last section of the book a bit unexciting. That being said, I absolutely understand why it was structured that way — we followed Cathy into her own mental and emotional growth.
All in all, I liked this book and I think it’s a great novel, but I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone. If you’re the kind of person who can appreciate classics and enjoy reading them because of it, I think you’ll like this one, too. But if those feel like a chore to read, this one might not be for you.
Trigger Warnings
Incest
Animal death
Abortion
Mental illness
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