This dispassionate, staccato record initially suggests that we can separate truth from desire. 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. Strangest of all, Selina seems to love her.Īs 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). '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. 'You think spiritualism a kind of fancy,' Selina riddles. Suffice it to say that the first full encounter between these two very different women is enthralling. 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. 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.' One person, however, makes her job a passion. 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. This plain woman on the verge of 30 has come to comfort those behind bars, several of whom Waters brings to instant, sad life. 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. Its stylistic and psychological rewards, however, are visible at every turn, the author's persuasive imagination matched by her gift for storytelling. Her intricate follow-up is just as sensual but infinitely darker, its moral more difficult to descry. In her first novel, Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters explored secrets and longing-capping off this lesbian romp with a utopian-socialist vision. Editorial Review Affinity is a tale of power and possession that Henry James himself might admire.

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