The Thirteenth Tale

“I like to disinter lives that have been buried in unopened diaries on archive shelves for a hundred years or more. Rekindling breath from memoirs that have been out of print for decades pleases me more than almost anything else.”

Margaret shares her experience as an amateur biographer who has focused exclusively on people who have caught her interest but are not necessarily famous. She sees her experience as not being up to the task of documenting Vida’s life but will discover that Vida’s life fits the parameters of the above quote, as her personal history is obscure and has been lost to time.

“My hand hovered instead over the old favorites: The Woman in White, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre...”

Margaret’s reading preferences, listed here, are all classic examples of gothic literature. These references offer insight into Margaret’s character, setting her up as a gothic heroine herself, as her journey parallels that of other famous gothic heroines.

“It’s what a combination of fame and secrecy does. With real knowledge about her so scant, fragments of information like the story of the recalled first edition take on an importance beyond their weight. It has become part of her mythology. The mystery of the thirteenth tale. It gives people something to speculate about.”

Margaret’s father is telling her about the value of the rare Vida Winter book that they have in their collection. The reference to mythology echoes Vida’s own words in the opening of her letter to Margaret that children mythologize their birth. It also explains the urgency of Vida’s request to Margaret, to help her finally tell her true story.

“Yorkshire was a county I knew only from novels, and novels from another century at that. Once we left the town behind, there were few signs of the contemporary world, and it was possible to believe I was traveling into the past at the same time as into the country-side.”

As Margaret travels into Yorkshire, a rural area that she has never visited, she feels as if she is simultaneously stepping backward in time. This quote supports the theme of Margaret as a Gothic Heroine, as she travels to a remote, unknown place. In addition, Yorkshire and its moors are the setting for some of the most famous works of gothic literature by the Brontë sisters.

“Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.”

Vida is explaining why it is necessary to begin her life story by going back to the story of her mother and father. It is a story, she admits, that she pieced together over the years, rather than having heard it from one source. However, her comments also pertain to Margaret’s own personal life, the death of her twin, and her relationship with her mother.

“That was that? The words were a curiously understated endnote to the disappearance of Miss Winter’s mother. It was clear that Miss Winter didn’t think much of Isabelle’s abilities as a parent; indeed the word mother seemed absent from her lexicon. Perhaps it was understandable; from what I could see, Isabelle was the least maternal of women. But who was I to judge other people’s relations with their mothers?”

After telling Margaret some of her family history, focusing mainly on Isabelle and Charlie, Vida ends their session abruptly. Margaret questions this dismissal of Isabelle but then connects Vida’s experience to Margaret’s history with her own mother. In the end, it is revealed that Isabelle was not Vida’s mother, which might explain some of her abrupt behavior.

“The house sat at an awkward angle. Arriving from the drive, you came upon a corner, and it was not at all clear which side of the house was the front. It was as though the house knew it ought to meet its arriving visitors face-on, but at the last minute couldn’t repress the impulse to turn back and gaze upon the deer park and the woodlands at the end of the terraces. The visitor was met not by a welcoming smile but by a cold shoulder.”

Margaret is visiting Angelfield for the first time and notices the odd, almost antisocial placement of the house. This personification of the house gives the reader an impression of Angelfield as resistant to outsiders, or perhaps just uninterested. Setterfield personifies the house in this quote as a way of indicating the attitudes of its inhabitants as well.

“This year the sense of foreboding was made worse by the weather. A heavy sky hovered repressively over the house, casting us into eternal dim twilight.”

Margaret is dreading her birthday in December, which is also the anniversary of her twin’s death. The weather underscores the dread that she is feeling, which highlights Setterfield’s use of a well-established gothic convention. This oppressive weather will continue until Margaret breaks through her own guilt and depression around the death of her twin.

“Foolish Hester. There is no privacy where there are children.”

Vida’s comment refers to the fact that children are very often hidden and eavesdropping, especially at Angelfield. She spent her childhood hiding from everyone except the Missus and John-the-dig. Margaret will recall this statement later, when Mr. Lomax tells her that he was hiding under the table when his father and Vida met, leading to his discovery that Vida and Adeline were one and the same.

“The separation of twins is no ordinary separation. Imagine surviving an earthquake. When you come to, you find the world unrecognizable…As for you, you are alive. But it’s not the same as living. It’s no wonder the survivors of such disasters so often wish they had perished with the others.”

Margaret is reflecting on the forced separation of Emmeline and Adeline. Her understanding of this event is filtered through her own experience of losing her twin, even though she was just a newborn. Setterfield emphasizes this theme of The Bond Between Twins throughout the novel, in both Margaret’s and Vida’s stories.

“Yet they still reconnected and were twins again. Though Emmeline was not the same twin as before, and this was something Adeline did not immediately know.”

After Hester’s abrupt departure, Emmeline and Adeline are reunited. Emmeline has changed and is developing her own identity, separate from Adeline. While Adeline disappeared into her own mind for the length of the separation, and thus remembers none of it, Emmeline was conscious and suffering but began to grow and move on.

“But that doesn’t make it my story, does it? Because before she opened the door…before she heard the sound in the night…before—”

Aurelius is telling Margaret his story, but from Mrs. Love’s point-of-view, because that is the only perspective he has. He recognizes that his story began before Mrs. Love found him, revealing that his biological mother abandoned him. This idea of whose story is being told, and how people’s stories are intertwined, is threaded throughout the novel.

“I wish someone could tell me what it means. I wish there was someone who could just tell me the truth.”

Aurelius does not know the story of his birth or the reason for his abandonment. After he makes this statement, Margaret realizes that Aurelius is the man in the brown suit who interviewed Vida. He knows that Vida has something to do with his story.

“With the deaths of the Missus and now John-the-dig, an additional chill crept into Miss Winter’s story. Was it Emmeline—that alarming figure in the garden—who had tampered with the ladder? I could only wait and let the story reveal itself.”

While the Missus’s death is of natural causes, John-the-dig’s death is much more suspicious. Margaret believes that someone must have released the safety catch on the ladder but cannot determine who might have done it. Vida is the only reasonable suspect, but she cannot believe that Vida, who clearly loved John, would do such a thing. This leaves Margaret with a mystery that seems unsolvable, until Margaret understands that there were three girls at Angelfield, not just two. 

“In truth I was not unwilling to abdicate my own life. Plunging deep into Miss Winter’s story was a way of turning my back on my own. Yet one cannot simply snuff oneself out in that fashion.”

Margaret has become so involved in Vida’s story that she has stopped ruminating on her own life, though she understands that she cannot simply set aside her own issues. The parallels between Vida’s story and Margaret’s will continue throughout the novel, and although Margaret is preoccupied with Vida’s story, she will resolve her own relationship issues with her dead twin.

“All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? …Well, it was like that. All day I had been prey to distractions. Thoughts memories, feelings, irrelevant fragments of my own life, playing havoc with my concentration.”

While Margaret has been staying with Vida, her birthday has been steadily approaching, but Margaret has been distracting herself by immersing herself in Vida’s story. However, the parallels between Vida’s story and Margaret’s own life have been causing her to think more and more about her own story. Margaret struggles with the idea of these two worlds, separated by a membrane, a window, or a mirror, on the other side of which is her twin.

“In a shallow sleep I saw strange visions. Hester and my father and the twins and my mother, visions in which everyone had someone else’s face, in which everyone was someone else disguised, and even my own face was disturbing to me as it shifted and altered, sometimes myself, sometimes another.”

Margaret’s own life continues to blur into the story that Vida is telling her. In this quote, Setterfield also raises another common gothic convention, the heroine who has visions. The fact that these visions result almost certainly from a fever supports another gothic convention, where seemingly supernatural events turn out to have banal, natural causes, but it also supports Setterfield’s development of Margaret as a Gothic Heroine.

“Talking of John and the garden reminds me–I must speak to him about the boy.”

In this excerpt from Hester’s diary, she recounts the first time she sees a young boy working in the garden, a child who John-the-dig refuses to admit exists. As the reader will later discover, it is also the first clue as to the real mystery of Angelfield. This is the first mention of the third child, whose existence, once Margaret discovers it, will resolve all of the mysteries surrounding Angelfield.

“‘When I was born,’ Miss Winter told me, ‘I was no more than a subplot.’”

Now that Margaret understands that Vida was not actually one of the twins, but the third child in the house, she is reconsidering everything that Vida has told her. She understands everything from a new perspective, including this comment from Vida. When Vida originally said it, early on in their sessions, Margaret did not understand. Now she knows that Vida considers herself a “subplot” because she was not, in fact, Emmeline or Adeline, but a product of Charlie’s rape of a local woman.

“My new knowledge blew life into the story. It began to breathe. And as it did so, it began to mend. The jagged edges smoothed themselves. The gaps filled themselves in. The missing parts were regenerated. Puzzles explained themselves and mysteries were mysteries no longer.”

Margaret has finally deciphered the clue that clarifies the mysterious aspects of the story Vida is telling her. The presence of a third child (Vida) explains all the small mysteries surrounding Angelfield. The boy in the garden, doors that will not stay closed, books that move from place to place, and the mysteries Hester couldn’t solve now make sense in light of this new perspective.

“It is a painful thing to love a twin. When Adeline was there, Emmeline’s heart was full. She had no need of me, and I was left on the outside, a cast-off, a superfluity, a mere observer of the twins and their twinness.”

Vida loves and is devoted to Emmeline, but she will never be first in Emmeline’s heart. This quote also connects back to Margaret’s own life and preoccupation with her twin to the exclusion of allowing other people into her life.

“Hers was a mad fire; it couldn’t catch; I knew it couldn’t. But I could not reassure myself. Her desire for flames was all the kindling she needed. All she had to do was look at something for it to spark. The incendiary magic she possessed was so strong she could set fire to water if she wanted to badly enough.”

Vida is watching Adeline build a fire in the fireplace and suspects that she means to burn the baby. She attributes nearly supernatural powers to Adeline, who the reader now realizes has a mental health condition. This is another gothic convention, most memorably represented by the “madwoman” Bertha in Jane Eyre, who also sets a fire and burns the estate down in the climax of that novel.

“‘Tell me about mum,’ I said to him. ‘Why is she the way she is?’”

Margaret is asking her father to explain the way her mother has always acted, for as long as Margaret can remember. This is significant because it is the first time she has directly addressed her mother’s behavior, which she has always assumed stemmed from resentment toward her, the living twin. Margaret is finally learning her own story, and doing so will allow her to move on from the loss of her twin and her damaged relationship with her mother.