A more honest statement would be that she does not want to believe. ‘This is not the first time she has heard of spiritualists, although she usually keeps such talk at a distance by saying she does not believe. In Victorian times, to have a condition that marked you different was to be subjected to the whims of whoever was in control of you: you could be sold to a circus, put into a cage for charged viewings, or, you could be transformed into a medium. As a child without parents, reliant on her sister, she was at the mercy of the worst of humanity, exacerbated by her albinism. Pearl’s situation within this story is horrifically all too common. The lengths mediums went to in order to create believability varied, but at times, were quite extraordinary. While for the most part, the unexplained could always be explained, to those desperate to connect with the ones they lost, belief was not rationale, as we see here, in The Shape of Darkness. It’s a fascinating topic and was a trade ripe for the pickings if you were able to manipulate the dark arts with some form of sensation. I’ve read a few books now on Spiritualism during the Victorian era and beyond. ‘This is what her beautiful city has come to: the beau monde and the dandies have fled, leaving only the spinsters, the soot and the ghosts behind.’ More Dickens than Austen, with some Bram Stoker thrown in. This Bath is firmly wearing the effects of Industrialisation, its glamour faded, its inhabitants ground down.

But this is not the Bath of Austen times. She writes with such a finely tuned atmosphere I was walking the streets of Victorian Bath alongside Agnes, all four senses alive with my surrounds. Her gothic horror tales of historical fiction are exactly my jam. There are few authors that astonish me with their imagination Laura Purcell sits among these few.

The shape of darkness a novel