Affinity: Summary & Key Insights

Margaret Prior’s visits to Millbank Prison mark the beginning of a journey from benevolence to obsession. When we first meet her, she is recovering from melancholy and from a failed attempt at self-destruction—an act born of grief and the suffocating gentility that rules her home. Her mother governs their domestic world with a combination of piety and control, and Margaret’s sister’s engagement intensifies her sense of alienation. In this genteel prison of propriety, Millbank seems paradoxically a place of purpose—a location where she might enact compassion, mask longing, and find moral renewal through service.

Millbank itself operates as a moral theatre. Its walls hold women condemned not only for theft or fraud but for behaving outside the social order. As a Lady Visitor, Margaret believes she can bring light into this darkness. But from her first steps across its echoing passageways, she feels an uncanny empathy with those she is meant to supervise; the chill of stone corridors seems to seep into her soul. The prison becomes almost alive—its silence pulsates, its air suffocates. It is here that she meets Selina Dawes, a prisoner whose poise and mysterious serenity disrupt all Margaret’s expectations.

Margaret’s diary, fragmented and intimate, traces her emotional descent. She enters the prison seeking meaning but soon finds herself captivated by Selina’s presence. Selina’s calm eyes seem to promise secret knowledge, spiritual mercy, perhaps even love. At first, Margaret rationalizes her attraction as moral sympathy, the compassion of reform. But the rhythm of her days shifts—Millbank calls to her more urgently than home. Each visit marks another step away from the world of sunlight and status, toward an inward shadow where yearning blurs into belief. Through her writing, Margaret builds a world of symbols and signs, interpreting coincidences and sensations as spiritual proof that she and Selina are bound by something greater than earthly confinement.

Selina Dawes’s story begins in candlelit parlors far removed from the prison’s damp stone. Before her arrest, she was celebrated among believers in spiritualism, performing séances that seemed to bridge worlds, comforting mourners eager to speak with their dead. The séances were theatres of longing, expressions of grief as much as of faith. Yet beneath their hopeful surface lay a struggle for power, money, and devotion. Selina thrived in this atmosphere of credulous enthusiasm until a session went disastrously wrong—a patron was harmed, another killed—and Selina was accused of fraud and assault.

Through flashbacks, the novel reconstructs this era of half-lit rooms and trembling believers. Selina’s sponsor, Mrs. Brink, sought consolation from spirits; Ruth Vigers, Selina’s assistant, adored her with fervent loyalty. These relationships revolve around dependence and manipulation. Selina possessed an uncanny ability to read desires—to discern what people most yearned to believe—and to give them just enough illusion to sustain their faith. Whether she truly believed in her own powers is impossible to determine. She speaks always in the language of mystic certitude, and her prison calm seems almost supernatural. The ambiguity surrounding her spiritualism is not mere craft; it is the axis of the novel’s gothic tension.

Margaret’s encounters with her awaken questions about truth and delusion. Selina’s serenity amidst punishment seduces Margaret into seeing her as transcendent. She begins to interpret every flicker of candlelight, every breath of air, as a sign of Selina’s invisible reach. As their bond deepens, the distinction between spiritual influence and emotional possession dissolves. Through Selina, Margaret achieves a rebellion against the rational world of Victorian restraint—a world that denies her passionate nature. But this rebellion through transcendence is perilous. Selina’s invocation of spirits—her promise that souls can move beyond matter—becomes a metaphor for forbidden love, a way to speak desire without speaking its name. In trusting her, Margaret risks surrendering both her clarity and her autonomy; in seeking liberation through another, she discovers how belief itself can be captivity.