Elspeth

Elspeth moves through a household where men's meetings fill the hall with top-hats while women are admitted on sufferance, crowded into stuffy galleries and seen as human only through their consecration to relationships. She stands at the threshold of this world, waiting within a room of dim twilight and rosy lamplight, herself a kind of question about what it costs a woman to breathe always the atmosphere of a consciousness that does not see her. Her waiting presence draws Miriam into the novel's central meditation on belonging, exclusion, and the life of the whole world flowing in.