Vida Winter, the protagonist of The Thirteenth Tale starts by saying that she wants her story told as stories should be told: with a proper beginning, middle, and end. She has hired a bookseller's daughter (and skilled antiquarian in her own right) named Margaret to record her life story. Although Vida Winter is a famous novelist, Margaret has never read her work, and has herself published only a small monograph on an obscure pair of brothers in 18th century France. So she wonders why Winter has selected her, and is reluctant to take on the task. But Margaret leads a diffident and unsatisfactory life, and after reading several of Winter's novels, decides that she will take on the challenge.
Vida Winter's story is of a highly dysfunctional family, in which parental neglect and innate insanity vie with one another to destroy the lives of every family member and of those few outsiders who come near. The novel is self-consciously based on Gothic romance with frequent mentions of Charlotte Bronte and especially of Jane Eyre. Or perhaps it would be better to say that the novel is a commentary and modern reflection of those novels. The novel takes place in 2 houses, one contemporary, one old and now destroyed, in the moors of northern England. The harsh weather and short winter days of northern England are a backdrop to the dark story that is being told, or played out, within the houses.
Running throughout the novel is the idea of identity, of what it means to be whole, to know one's place in the world, and to be comfortable there. Setterfield explores this primarily by looking at twin-ness : what effect on identity is there by being a twin? What happens when twins are separated?
I don't ordinarily like stories of this sort - I was never able to finish any novel written by any of the Bronte sisters, for example. But I did like this one quite a lot. It was part ghost story, part tragedy, part commentary on what it means to be a reader or a writer. It was actually hard to put down, and had a very satisfactory ending as a kind of bonus.
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