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

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With her sumptuous use of words, she evokes a rich, gothic setting, and a quietly sinister and claustrophobic atmosphere that I adored. I began by listening to and learning by heart all kinds of rhymes and hymns and ballads, and then went on to make up my own poems, using the forms I’d heard. Since I'm currently reading the novels longlisted for this year's Women's Prize I thought I'd go back and read Dunmore's “A Spell of Winter” which won this award's very first prize in 1996 (when it was known as the Orange Prize. 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. Catherine – like her mother before her – takes charge of her life in unexpected ways that defy social convention.

It is is set in Leningrad during the first year of the siege of the city by German forces, which lasted for 880 days from the fall of Mga on 30th August 1941.

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. What particularly lifts the novel above being just another well-told story is the magic of Dunmore’s writing which is finely crafted in a way that is poetic, creative and vivid.

Cathy, knowing she will not find her way back home on her own, frightens her with ghost stories, then abandons her. And then Cathy finally meets up with her mother again, but we never find out why the mother left in the first place? Abandoned by her mother as a child, embarrassed by the mental breakdown of her father that led to his hospitalisation, and ignored by the grandfather who finds too much pain in her resemblance to his absent daughter, she clings to her brother, Rob, for comfort. Voor mij 5 sterren omdat dit boek niet onder 1 noemer te vatten valt, omdat de taal zo mooi en verzorgd is, omdat de schrijfster mij soms ongemakkelijk deed heen en weer schuiven in mijn zetel, omdat ik het moeilijk kon opzij leggen.This haunting and evocative novel was the first Orange Prize Winner and set a high standard for future hopefuls.

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. 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. This feels like early Dunmore as there's an aimless drift to the story: too much is obscure and unconvincing, and the shape is constructed from Gothic tropes that feel overdone and a bit lifeless. The children are sealed off with their grandfather in a crumbling country estate accompanied by their sturdy and well-loved servant, Kate, and the predatory tutor, Miss Gallagher. Rob and Catherine live in virtual isolation in the crumbling old house belonging to their grandfather.The house and characters are both occupied by dark secrets and watching the evolution/aftermath which is derived from them makes for compulsive reading. 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.

Rob just flounces off to Canada for no particular reason, and then he comes back and goes off to the war and we never find out what happened to him? A wonderfully written saga of love and decline both in the class system and amongst a pair of siblings. Dunmore's writing is put to more meaningful purpose in many of her other books: this one almost seems to suffocate under its own entrancing and perfumed lyricism. 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. As the book progresses, nature begins to reclaim the old mansion, and Catherine finds satisfaction and meaning through her work on the land.Cathy leads her governess, the monstrous Miss Gallagher, deep into the woods and frightens her to death with talk of ghosts. The atmosphere and setting reminded me of a couple of my favourite William Trevor novels ( Fools of Fortune and The Story of Lucy Gault - they share the decaying country house settings and the Anglo-Irish family settings, and they share the elegiac tone with darker overtones and the quality of the writing. The war fit the other content, but somehow it didn’t quite fit the shape and pace of the rest of the story. By presenting them and their often deplorable actions without judgement, she asks us to question human boundaries, allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions in many instances. I thought this understated yet powerful sense that we are not so far removed from the natural world was handled really well.