All are very welcome to join us for the next Melodrama Research Group meeting. Tamar has very kindly provided the following introduction to this week’s text:

Affinity, Sarah Waters’ 1999 novel, introduces the reader to two different women: Margaret, melancholy, wealthy, stifled by the protocols of upper-middle class Victorian society and its assumptions about appropriate goals and desires for women, and Selena, clairvoyant, desperate, and literally confined by the walls of Millbank prison, where she is serving a custodial sentence for ‘fraud and assault’. Both women’s lives are easily readable within the parameters of the female Gothic; the novel’s iconography and tropes are familiar, with abundant uses of the genre’s secrets, keys, doubling and uncanny occurrences, and with Millbank standing in for the Old Dark House. But Waters’s work pushes us to think, and to work, harder, challenging us not only to interpret her data but also to judge the genre itself. It seems the question we should be asking as we see the two women’s paths converge is: who is the heroine?

Come and join us at the usual place and time (Jarman 7, 5.00- 7.00pm, Monday 28th November) for discussion of the novel and its implications for the Gothic genre.