A Spell of Winter
by Helen Dunmore
Summary
Catherine and Rob grow up nearly alone in their grandfather's decaying rural English house in the years before the First World War. Their mother has fled abroad, a scandal nobody in the house will explain; their father is taken away to an institution; and the adults who remain are a grandfather locked in his own silences, a servant, Kate, who provides most of the warmth, and Miss Gallagher, a governess whose devotion to Catherine is possessive enough to feel like a trap.
Out of that isolation the two children grow into each other, and Dunmore does not blink: the love between brother and sister becomes physical, and the novel makes the reader understand it as the only heat in a frozen house before it shows the cost. Catherine's pregnancy ends in an illegal abortion, rendered with terrible clarity, and the secret gives Miss Gallagher a power over her that ends in the woods, in the book's darkest turn.
Then history does what history does. Rob leaves, first for Canada with Kate, then for France and the war, and goes missing; Catherine is left keeping the house through the hungry war years, and the last movement carries her toward Brittany and the mother whose absence started everything.
It reads like a gothic novel because it is one, written in a poet's close, sensuous prose, all frost, blood and hothouse air.
Around three hundred pages.
Best for readers who want the dark house novel done with complete conviction, and who take the incest warning seriously before starting.
Historical Context & Significance
A Spell of Winter won the very first Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996, which gives it a permanent place in the story of the prize itself: founded after a 1991 Booker shortlist with no women on it, dismissed in advance by half of literary London, and immediately vindicated by a winner this dark and this good. The Washington Post called the book an erotic pastoral and reached for Wuthering Heights; the New York Times dissented, finding it overwrought, and the argument was excellent publicity.
Helen Dunmore was a poet first and stayed one, and the novels, Zennor in Darkness, this book, and above all The Siege, her 2001 novel of the Leningrad blockade, carry a poet's compression. She wrote to the end on her own terms: dying of cancer in 2017, at sixty four, she finished Inside the Wave, a collection about approaching death, and it won the Costa Book of the Year posthumously, an honour only Ted Hughes had taken that way before her.