Recovering from an undefined nervous illness brought on by the grief following the death of her father, she believes this will be a worthwhile occupation to fill her time away from home and her overbearing mother, and will bring much-needed relief to the women prisoners who are living in deplorable conditions in the jail, where the emphasis, typical of the times, is on punishment. Or can we? What Waters's haunting creation leaves us with is a more painful reality–that knowledge and belief are entirely different things.When Margaret Prior accepts to become a 'Lady Visitor' at Millbank Prison in London, she is far from suspecting what tangled skeins await her in the endless corridors of the dank and cold prison, with it's wing holding women prisoners who are there for crimes as diverse as attempted suicide, infanticide, arson, petty theft, and fraud. 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.
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