The House of Stairs
The third Barbara Vine novel published by Viking in 1988
The past which Barbara Vine oh-so-gradually reveals dances around a 50ish woman named Cosette and her large household, but also comes to include the specter of a terrible genetic disease, at least two murders (probably three), love as symbiosis and love as parasitism, and an elaborate fraud.
Lizzie hasn’t seen her old friend, Bell, for some fourteen years. But when she spots her from a taxi on a London street she jumps out and pursues her despite all the terrible things that passed between them. As Lizzie reveals those events, little by little, the women rekindle their friendship, with terrifying results.
Notes
Henry James often frequented Mentmore, the country seat of the Liberal politician Lord Roseberry, where a Bronzino portrait was reputed to hang in the octagonal library.
Andrew Davies is half way through a Barbara Vine adaptation, a murder mystery called The House of Stairs
. 2
Contemporary Reads 3
Michael Dibdin - Ratking
Penelope Fitzgerald - The Beginning of Spring
Alan Furst - Night Soldiers
James Ellroy- The Big Nowhere
Stephen Hawking - A Brief History Of Time
Peter Carey - Oscar and Lucinda
Footnotes
Ruth Rendell Chills and Fevers, Washington Post 1989. ↩︎
Andrew Davies interview, The Telegraph, 2016. ↩︎
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