Book
Affinity
Margaret Prior, recovering from grief and illness, begins charitable visits to the women’s wards of Millbank Prison in the 1870s. There she meets Selina Dawes, a spiritualist medium imprisoned after a séance ended in scandal and death. Margaret’s interest in Selina becomes increasingly personal, drawing the novel into questions of confinement, class, belief, desire and deception in Victorian London.
Millbank's architecture and regulations intensify Margaret's emotional dependence on the imprisoned medium. Spiritualism offers a language for connection that seems to cross walls, social conventions and even death, but it also depends upon performance and belief. The novel steadily makes confinement psychological as well as physical, asking which woman actually understands the limits of the relationship being created between them.
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