What I had learned of prose technique through the short story gave me the impetus to start writing novels. The bonds that emerge between the characters are perfectly and truthfully played out, and Dunmore offers a fresh perspective on the consequences of human solitude that few authors would be able to put to words as delicately as her. Both arguably felt ensnared and defined by their role within the family, and both must find their own ways to break the chain of inheritance, both literal and metaphorical. Cathy leads her governess, the monstrous Miss Gallagher, deep into the woods and frightens her to death with talk of ghosts.

Mostly the children run wild in the woods and there is a sense of nature, both bounteous and grisly in Dunmore’s atmospheric setting where images of violence against small animals recur. It's a bit of a demanding read--Dunmore leaps across time and space, her narrative mirroring the way people think, but as a result, you are immersed completely. A less experienced author may have turned this into a "romantic melodrama", but Delbanco stated that Dunmore's "authoritative telling" has produced a "haunt[ing]" tale.It also seemed surprisingly emotionless after the string of heart-wrenching tragedies leading up to it. But the book only floats along--surprisingly explicit in some aspects, it still leaves too many secrets to linger in implication; its tone is always cold, dreamy, disconnected, and its impact follows suit. Unsettling love and stifled horror create and then destroy the claustrophobic world of this lush, literary gothic set in turn-of-the-century England. Her third novel, A Spell of Winter, won the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996, and she went on to become a Sunday Times bestseller with The Siege, which was described by Antony Beevor as a ‘world-class novel’ and was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year and the Orange Prize.

I studied English at the University of York, and after graduation taught English as a foreign language in Finland. The plot describes the life of Catherine, who lives with her grandfather, her brother Rob and an Irish servant Kate in her grandfather's country house, which they struggle to maintain, after her mother has left her father and the family and the father has died. My father was the eldest of twelve, and this extended family has no doubt had a strong influence on my life, as have my own children.I wanted us to wake to a kingdom of ice where our breath would turn to icicles as it left our lips, and we would walk through tunnels of snow to the outhouses and find birds fallen dead from the air. Although I was expecting more plot, and more revelation, this is more a study of sadness or an exploration of family.

I was especially taken with the last third or so of the book, as we move towards and into the First World War, and Catherine must decide her future in a very different present. The author's name seemed really familiar to me until I realised I'd been staring at her children's work for about a year by then, but I hadn't known she'd written books for adults, too. There’s a lazy quality here, something difficult to describe, but something which is nonetheless compelling and confusing all at once.

Alone in their grandfather's decaying country house, they roam the wild grounds freely with minds attuned to the rural wilderness.

My grandfather had turned my parents into shadows, and, as far as I knew, everybody had agreed to it. Her writing is so powerful and evocative it enables her to depict the dark events in this novel as something beautiful and real. I finished the book in hopes of discovery the answer to the family secrets but found no satisfaction there or anywhere else in this book.Attempts by Dunmore to make Cathy a "modern update" of Brontë's Catherine Earnshaw turns A Spell of Winter into "a string of salacious, increasingly overwritten adventures straight out of the pulp-fiction files". It’s hard to relegate such an important world event that clearly impacted these characters immensely to a mere chapter in their lives, but I do wonder whether the backdrop of this particular time period actually adds anything to the story. It’s nice to think that Dunmore got the prize off to a flying start (just check out the people who have received the award since), especially as the author died a couple of years ago. A Spell of Winter is the kind of book whose pages turn easily, not because of a compelling story or entrancing characters, but because Dunmore weaves a soft, dreamlike tale of first love and guilty secrets.