My name, in those days, was Susan Trinder. People called me Sue. I know the year I was born in, but for many years I did not know the date, and took my birthday at Christmas. I believe I am an orphan. My mother I know is. dead. But I never saw her, she was nothing to me. I was Mrs Sucksby's child, if I was anyone's…
The opening lines of the book are also the opening lines of the Part II. Separated into three sections, the first and third are narrator by Susan. Writing about this novel is difficult to do without giving away its many—many—incendiary revelations. Suffice to say that it is entirely appropriate, maybe even brilliantly so, to open the narrative with what appears to be a rather mundane and inartistic biography. This is declarative sentence construction at its most basic level: simply providing factual information as it is known while revealing that much of the known information are facts that remain unknown. Basic yet complicated. It is a preview of everything to come.
The start, I think I know too well. It is the first of my mistakes.
Maud Lilly takes over the narration for Part II. By this point, information was known by Susan has ultimately been revealed to be informed and shaped by information that was not known. But what is known by Susan the reader turns out through Maud’s narration to still be unknown to Susan. That is to say, while the reader gets to fill in some of the confusing gaps caused by misinformation related to Susan, she remains ignorant of the things that now have become know to the reader. This complex interweaving of the facts, misinformation and ignorance introduces a new, considerably deeper level of irony into the story which was absent during Susan’s narration. The ironic distancing is subtly hinted at with the first words of Maud’s narration which could very easily be translated into the words of the reader who is manipulated into thinking they’ve known what is going on while Maud has been in the dark. The pervasive irony which takes over Part II is layered as it is becomes clear that the reader has made a mistake in thinking they know too well what is going on.
I shrieked. I shrieked and shrieked. I struggled like a fiend. But the more I twisted, the tighter I was held. I saw Gentleman fall back in his seat and the coach start up and begin to turn. I saw Maud put her face to the window of cloudy glass. At sight of her eyes, I shrieked again.
Part III picks up right where Part I left off, but now the reader is in possession of much more information. What is especially fascinating about the novel is its manipulation of perception. Throughout Part I, a basic layer of dramatic irony exists in the distance between what the reader knows that Maud Lilly does not. As Part I draws to its unexpectedly twisted conclusion, however, that irony is thrown back on the reader who now understands that this basic level of dramatic irony still defines the story to that point, but not in the way they thought. At the end of Part I the reader is as confused as Susan and, having been encouraged to identify with her perspective as the narrator, has been conditioned to see the situation she finds herself in exactly as she does. Part II affords the reader information not available to Susan and so by the opening of Part III it is clear that Susan’s suffering in this final section is not entirely due to the reasons she suspects. So now there is yet another layer of irony added to the narrative and it is Susan hysteria—indicated here in these opening lines of Part III—that introduces tragic irony into the tale. Bad faith sets in motion an arc that seems inexorably and inevitably headed for a devastating emotional cataclysm.
This paper to be a true and legally binding statement of my wishes; a contract between myself and Grace Sucksby, in defiance of my father and brother; which is to be recognised in Law.
Everything which occurs in the story springs forth from the last will and testament signed by Marianne Lilly, daughter, sister and mother. Marianne is eventually committed to a mental asylum and dies there as the result of witnessing one too many sights more than her fragile psyche is capable of handling. The will—and the generous inheritance contained within the testament—set in motion the series of machinations which result in a confusion of identity, motivation, purpose and intent and ironies piled on top of ironies.
