A Dark-Adapted Eye
The first Barbara Vine novel published by Viking in 1986
This is a rich, complex novel with an ingenuity in construction worthy of Wilkie Collins. Full of shifts and surprises. A modern novel with the Victorian virtues of a carefully devised plot unfolded for the reader with the most cunning art.
Like most families, they had their secrets. And they hid them under a genteelly, respectable veneer. No onlooker would guess that prim Vera Hillyard and her beautiful, adored younger sister, Eden, were locked in a dark and bitter combat over one of those secrets.
England in the fifties was not kind to women who erred, so they had to use every means necessary to keep the truth hidden behind closed doors, even murder.
Notes
Dark adaptation: a condition of vision brought about progressively by remaining in complete darkness for a considerable period, and characterised by progressive increase in retinal sensitivity. A dark-adapted eye is an eye in which dark adaptation has taken place.
2Winner of Best Novel at the Edgars.
Adapted for TV in 1994.
Barbara Vine, otherwise known as Ruth Rendell, meets James Naughtie and a small audience at a Readers’ Day in Scunthorpe to talk about her haunting novel.
Tracing the UK’s complicated relationship with the death penalty.
Ruth Rendell: five key works.
The best of Ruth Rendell: 10 to read, watch and listen to.
Contemporary Reads 3
P.D. James - A Taste for Death
Kingsley Amis - The Old Devils
Penelope Fitzgerald - Innocence
John le Carré - A Perfect Spy
Philip Pullman - The Shadow in the North
Robert Goddard - Past Caring
Footnotes
Sunday Times, 1986. ↩︎
A Dictionary of Psychology, Oxford University Press 2001 ↩︎
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