Date: Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:39:32 -0400
From: Kathleen Silc
Subject: Pittsboro Memorial Library Book Club
Friends of the Pittsboro Memorial Library Book Club will meet on Tuesday, September 2nd at 6:45 pm in the Reeves Gallery at the library. The book selection is “The Thirteenth Tale” by Diane Setterfield (Fiction). Join us.
Former academic Setterfield pays tribute in her debut to Brontë and du Maurier heroines: a plain girl gets wrapped up in a dark, haunted ruin of a house, which guards family secrets that are not hers and that she must discover at her peril. Margaret Lea, a London bookseller’s daughter, has written an obscure biography that suggests deep understanding of siblings.
She is contacted by renowned aging author Vida Winter, who finally wishes to tell her own, long-hidden, life story. Margaret travels to Yorkshire, where she interviews the dying writer, walks the remains of her estate at Angelfield and tries to verify the old woman’s tale of a governess, a ghost and more than one abandoned baby. With the aid of colorful Aurelius Love, Margaret puzzles out generations of Angelfield: destructive Uncle Charlie; his elusive sister, Isabelle; their unhappy parents; Isabelle’s twin daughters, Adeline and Emmeline; and the children’s caretakers. Contending with ghosts and with a (mostly) scary bunch of living people, Setterfield’s sensible heroine is, like Jane Eyre, full of repressed feeling?and is unprepared for both heartache and romance. And like Jane, she’s a real reader and makes a terrific narrator.
That’s where the comparisons end, but Setterfield, who lives in Yorkshire, offers graceful storytelling that has its own pleasures
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