A Spell of Winter: WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

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This experience of working in many different countries and cultures has been very important to my work. Her governess takes pity on pretty, almost-orphaned Cathy and loves her nearly to the point of obsession.

You also come to understand very early that stories hold quite different meanings for different listeners, and can be recast from many viewpoints. I've read it twice and plan on reading it again because it is a truly beautifully written, haunting tale. My critical work includes introductions to the poems of Emily Brontë, the short stories of D H Lawrence and F Scott Fitzgerald, a study of Virginia Woolf’s relationships with women and Introductions to the Folio Society's edition of Anna Karenina and to the new Penguin Classics edition of Tolstoy's My Confession. On one hand I liked the way the novel is insightful: Catherine’s state of mind when she finds out that the world is changing, the minute descriptions of all the characters and the little twists and turns in the narrative. Catherine, the protagonist, grows up a closely matched pair with her brother, Rob, all the more so as their mother has left, their father is institutionalized, and their grandfather is remote.My third novel, A Spell of Winter, won the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996, and since then I have published a number of novels, short story collections and books for children.

Reading this book made me feel the way I felt when I watched The Piano or Angels and Insects, or read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. However effective that atmosphere, it deadens the intensity of relationships and characters's sufferings. I also thought the book’s ending chapter somewhat anticlimactic; the final scenes depict the first time Cathy is able to make reasonably informed decisions in her own interest, and seeing convictions from her younger years overturned is a victory in itself, but I found the ease with which she makes those choices and the apparent lack of conflict in following them through rather bizarre.I appreciate ambiguity that can go one way or another, but too many possibilities leaves a story feeling unfinished, imo. We see events through the eyes of Cathy - a young girl who so resembles her mother that her grandfather can hardly bear to look at her, while their governess, the boy hating Miss Gallagher, harbours an obsessive and unhealthy love for her. My seventh novel, The Siege (2001) was shortlisted both for the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction. But as they enter adulthood the close bond they share must be left behind though Catherine ardently wants things to remain the same. The children are never told exactly what caused their family to splinter apart so they grow to rely solely on each other in this circumscribed world.

With the exception of a few bumbling sentences (such as " Elsie shudders exaggeratedly as she goes away in the early December dusk"), Dunmore's craft exudes an easy rhythm and dips in and out of the past and present with a fluidity akin to waves gently lapping at the shore. Although I was expecting more plot, and more revelation, this is more a study of sadness or an exploration of family.They are brought up by servants in the house of their grandfather, an Irishman who made his fortune somehow and is known in the neighbourhood as ‘the man from nowhere’. Unsettling love and stifled horror create and then destroy the claustrophobic world of this lush, literary gothic set in turn-of-the-century England. Also, it won the Orange Prize in 1996, so someone with literary power obviously thought it was good, too.