Woodman, Sue (1 July 1996). "Orange is a female color". The Nation. Washington D.C . Retrieved 12 December 2011. (subscription required) Blood seeped rustily out of me…. I thought I would never stop bleeding” (189). These are the words of Cathy after her abortion. Blood is mentioned numerous times in the text. Give more examples. Why did the author choose blood as a definitive symbol?

To begin with, it’s very dreamy. I didn’t know where I was, and I didn’t understand the characters or their relationship with one another. It’s all very ephemeral, held together with a precarious structure, like a cobweb you see only when the mist settles on it. Dunmore seems to delight in being evasive, maybe a little too much. Not many novels grab the reader’s lapels with the opening sentence, but Helen Dunmore’s A Spell of Winter is surely one. . . . We plunge headlong into Dunmore’s dark and creepy tale, an update of such Gothic literary classics as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. . . . Dunmore’s gifts are considerable.”” Houston Chronicle The author's name seemed really familiar to me until I realised I'd been staring at her children's work for about a year by then, but I hadn't known she'd written books for adults, too. Both servants fiercely guard the mysteries of the family heritage from Rob and Cathy. This inverts common behavior, resulting in outsiders who are better informed about the family than the family itself. What effect does this have on Cathy? Rob?

This novel was the first winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996. I bought it after the book blogger Simon Savidge and his wonderful mother, Louise Savidge, started reading past winners of the Women's Prize for Fiction. The Orange Prize became the Bailey's Prize in 2012 and after 2017, the Women's Prize for Fiction. For the past two years, I have read a number of the longlisted titles, and look forward to the nominations and awards.

Well, are you going or not?’ she demanded impatiently. `It’s you that’s eating these muffins, not me.’ Set largely in the build up to WWI, the story is narrated by Catherine, a young woman who feels increasingly cut off from the outside world. 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. Hunkering down for the winter in their secluded, crumbling mansion, their mutual misplaced need for love takes their relationship down a dark and dangerous path that will pit them against the few who remain close to them. Give it to Mrs Blazer, she’ll hang it and roast you a fine saddle of hare for Sunday,’ said old Semple. Theodore looked intently at it, as if he were imagining what it would taste like. We often gave them rabbits, but hare was richer, different, darker meat.Death of Novelist Helen Dunmore Announced". Foyles. 5 June 2017. Archived from the original on 8 June 2017. Mother was gone, and Father was away. There was Kate to look after us, and Eileen in the sewing-room, and the kitchen warm and humming with people. There was Grandfather in London. There was nothing to be frightened of here. The fluttering shadows only startled me because they were sudden, like moths’ wings.