The Thirteenth Tale

I picked up The Thirteenth Tale on a rainy weekend because someone told me it was a ghost story for people who love bookshops. That description is close enough to get you through the door, though the book itself is stranger and sadder than the label suggests. It came out in 2006 as Diane Setterfield's first novel, published in the United States by Atria Books, and within a week it sat at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Four hundred sixteen pages in the hardcover edition, and most of them smell faintly of damp stone, old paper, and fire smoke. If you like gothic stories where a big house holds the answer and nobody will say it plainly, this one was built for you.

The frame is simple. A famous old novelist is dying and wants to tell the truth at last. A young woman who writes lives of forgotten dead people is asked to take it down. What follows is two stories braided together: the life being told, and the life of the person hearing it. Both women are haunted by sisters. That doubling runs through everything, and Setterfield never lets you forget it for long.

The bookseller's daughter with a missing sister

Margaret Lea lives above her father's secondhand bookshop and works in it when she is not writing biographies of minor literary figures, the kind of people who died obscure and stayed that way. She is twentyish, quiet, and careful with books in the way some people are careful with animals. Her father found her reading in the shop as a child and basically raised her among the shelves. Her mother keeps her distance, polite but cold, and for a long time Margaret does not fully grasp why.

When Margaret was ten, she learned the reason by accident. She was once a conjoined twin. Her sister died soon after the two were separated, and her mother never recovered from the loss. Margaret grew up feeling the shape of an absence she could not name, and then, once she knew, feeling guilty for surviving it. She scratches at her own skin when she is distressed. She does not date. She reads. This private grief matters because it is the reason Vida Winter picks her, and it is the reason Margaret cannot walk away once the story starts. She recognizes the weight of a lost sister from the inside.

The letter arrives out of nowhere. Vida Winter, the enormously popular novelist whose books Margaret has never actually read, writes in her own hand to ask Margaret to come and write her biography. Winter is famous for lying to the press. Over sixty years she has given interviewers a string of colorful pasts, every one invented, and corrected none of them. Now her health is failing and she says she wants the true account set down before she dies. Margaret's first instinct is to refuse. She is a small-time biographer, not a ghostwriter for a celebrity, and the whole offer smells of a game.

What hooks her is a book. Her father owns a rare copy of Winter's early collection, printed under the title Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation, back when there were supposed to be thirteen stories in it. Something went wrong at press. Only twelve stories made it into the volume, the title was later changed to drop the number, and the few copies with the original title became collectors' items. Margaret reads the twelve stories in a sitting and finds them genuinely good, unsettling in the old-fashioned way, full of changelings and snow and locked doors. Then she counts again. Twelve. Readers have been asking Winter for decades where the thirteenth tale went, and Winter has never answered. Margaret goes to meet the old woman mostly to say no in person. She stays because Winter promises her a ghost story about twins, and because Margaret, who lost a twin, cannot refuse that particular bait.

Vida Winter and the price of the truth

Vida Winter lives in a large, cold Yorkshire house with a housekeeper and a garden she can no longer walk far in. She is direct to the point of rudeness, funny in short bursts, and clearly in pain more often than she admits. She has sent away journalists, scholars, and at least one professional biographer over the years. She tells Margaret she chose her because Margaret writes about the dead with respect and without sensationalism, and because Margaret has no stake in the literary world that made Winter rich. Whether that is the full reason is one of the book's slow reveals.

Margaret does not trust her, which is sensible given Winter's record. Before agreeing to anything, Margaret demands proof of good faith: three facts from Winter's life that can be checked against public records. Winter, annoyed but cornered, supplies them, and Margaret verifies each one through registers and archives. The details check out. So Margaret stays, sets up her tape recorder and notebooks, and agrees to Winter's one rule. The story will be told straight through with no interruptions and no questions until it is finished. Winter begins with a sentence Margaret will hear in her sleep for months: "Once upon a time there were two little girls..."

The telling takes up the heart of the novel. Winter talks in long sessions in her library while Margaret writes everything down at night. In the gaps between sessions, Margaret lives a half life in the nearby town, eating alone, reading Hester Barrow's diary pages when she can get them, trading theories with Aurelius Love, a gentle older man who runs a cake shop and has his own stake in the Angelfield past. A young doctor checks on Winter. Letters arrive. The past keeps leaking into the present, which is exactly what a gothic novel is supposed to do, and Setterfield handles the rhythm well. Just when the old story grows almost unbearably tense, she cuts back to Margaret making tea or walking in the rain, and you are grateful for the air.

One structural trick deserves mention because Margaret herself notices it. For most of the telling, Winter narrates her own history in the third person, as if she watched it happen to other people. Then, at a moment of crisis in the story, the pronoun slips. Winter says "I." Margaret catches it and says nothing, filing it away. It is a small crack, and the whole mystery eventually widens from it. Readers who pay attention to grammar will get there a little early. Readers who read for atmosphere will not mind arriving late.

Angelfield: the house where everything went wrong

Winter's story centers on Angelfield, a country estate in the middle of its long decay, and on the March family who owned it. George March, the master of the house, is distracted and weak. His wife Mathilde, once beautiful, drifts through the rooms in a medicated haze after something broke in her years before. Their daughter Isabelle is lovely, wild, and feral in the manner of girls raised without supervision. Her half brother Charlie, George's son by another liaison, is bookish, awkward, and fixated on Isabelle in a way that curdles as they grow older. The house itself is going soft: leaking roofs, closed rooms, gardens running to weed. Servants come and go. Nobody is steering.

Isabelle gets pregnant, though by whom is left cloudy for a long stretch, and gives birth to twin girls, Adeline and Emmeline. Almost immediately Isabelle abandons any interest in motherhood. The twins grow up effectively unattended, running half wild through the house and grounds, and from the start everyone remarks on how different they are. Adeline is fierce, quick, and violent. She bites, scratches, and sets fires in small ways before she learns to set them in large ones. Emmeline is vague, placid, and oddly absent, as if part of her never fully arrived. The household copes by treating them as a single problem rather than two children, which turns out to be a catastrophic error.

Into this mess come two outsiders who try, in their limited ways, to help. Hester Barrow, a brisk and principled young woman, is hired as governess and keeps a diary that becomes one of Margaret's most important sources. Hester sees what the family will not see: that the twins are not being raised at all, that Isabelle is unfit, that Charlie's attachment to his half sister has curdled into something controlling and frightening. The local doctor, Maudsley, attends the family and forms his own worried opinions, particularly about Emmeline's odd detachment. Neither of them has the power to remove the children, and the era gives them few tools. So they watch, they write things down, and they fail in the slow way decent people fail inside rotten houses.

The middle of Winter's tale is a chain of small disasters that tightens into a large one. Charlie takes over more and more of the household as George fades. Money grows short. Isabelle deteriorates. The twins, left to each other, develop a private world with private rules, and Adeline enforces those rules with cruelty when anyone tries to separate them. A fire destroys part of the house and kills one of the central figures, though saying exactly who and how would give away the turn Setterfield wants you to feel cold. What matters here is the texture: the nursery with its twin beds, the garden wall the girls climb, the way Emmeline follows Adeline everywhere like a shadow that has learned to walk. By the time the fire comes, you understand that Angelfield was already a ruin. The flames only made it official.

The twins, the baby, and the question of who survived

After the fire, the official story is neat and probably wrong. One twin is said to have died. The surviving girl is raised in altered circumstances, and in time she disappears into a new identity altogether. Years pass. The girl who lived becomes Vida Winter, bestselling author, inventor of pasts, keeper of the one true story she has never told. Or so Winter's account claims. Margaret, doing what biographers do, starts checking.

This is where Aurelius Love enters, and he is the book's softest and most necessary creation. Aurelius is a kind, overweight, middle-aged man who was found as an infant in a perambulator with nothing but a few belongings and left in the care of a local woman, Mrs. Love, who raised him as her own. He has spent his whole life wondering who his mother was. A silver spoon, a photograph, and a damaged copy of a book form the thin trail he has followed for decades. When Margaret meets him, he is still following it, politely and without self pity, and the two lonely investigators fall into an alliance that steadies them both. Aurelius bakes. Margaret reads. Between them they start pulling at the one thread Winter's story leaves loose: what happened to the baby born at Angelfield in the last bad year.

I want to be careful here because the pleasure of the last hundred pages is watching Margaret assemble the answer from documents, and summarizing it too flatly would sell it short. The broad shape, which counts as fair game in a summary this size, runs like this. There was a child, born in secret and hidden for reasons tangled up in shame and violence, and that child was carried out of the Angelfield wreckage before the fire finished its work. The records around the birth were muddled, partly by panic and partly on purpose. Aurelius has been circling his own origin his entire adult life without knowing how close he lived to it. When Margaret finally sees how the dates and names line up, the effect is less a shock than a settling, as if a picture frame that hung crooked for four hundred pages has been straightened.

The deeper question is the one Winter has been dodging since page one. Which twin survived the fire, and who is the woman telling this story. Adeline or Emmeline. The fierce one or the vague one. The girl who hurt people or the girl who drifted. Margaret works it out through a combination of the pronoun slip, Hester's diary, medical notes, and one physical detail I will leave for you to find, and the answer reframes everything Winter said in the early sessions. The third-person narration was not a literary choice. It was a hiding place. Once you know who is speaking, passages you read as odd weeks ago turn out to have been exact.

There is also the matter of Margaret's own sister, which Setterfield keeps braided alongside the main mystery rather than resolving it cheaply. Margaret's twin died in infancy after their separation, and Margaret has carried both grief and guilt into adulthood, along with the conviction that her mother blames her for living. Over the course of the winter she spends with Vida, Margaret starts to write honestly about her sister for the first time, and to understand her mother's coldness as depression rather than accusation. The scene where Margaret finally talks to her mother without flinching is one of the quietest in the book and one of the best. No ghosts appear. Nobody forgives anybody in a speech. Things shift by an inch, which in this novel counts as a mile.

The ending gives Margaret the thing readers were promised on the jacket copy. Winter, dying, hands over the missing thirteenth tale of the old collection, the story that was pulled before publication and never replaced. It turns out to be Margaret's story as much as Winter's, a short narrative about sisters and survival that closes the loop between the two women. Margaret writes the biography. Winter dies. Aurelius learns who he is. Whether any of them are healed is left sensibly unclear. They know the truth, which in this book is rarer and harder than healing.

What works, what drags, and who should read it

The storytelling hunger is the book's great strength. Setterfield writes scenes you can see and hear: the bookshop stairs, the library fire, the twins' nursery, the cake shop counter where Aurelius wraps things too carefully. Her sentences are plain more often than fancy, and when she reaches for atmosphere she usually earns it through accumulation rather than adjectives. Winter's voice, dry and imperious and occasionally frightened, carries the long central section past stretches where a lesser narrator would lose you. Margaret makes a good listener because she is damaged in ways that rhyme with the story without duplicating it. You believe she would stay. You believe she would check the records.

The criticism first, since this book has real weaknesses under the charm. The middle sags. Between the setup and the fire there is a long run of governess diary, doctor visits, and household decay that covers ground other gothic novels covered first, and readers who know Jane Eyre and The Woman in White will spot the borrowing early. Setterfield adores those books openly, and Margaret even discusses them in the text, but acknowledgment does not fully solve the problem. Some passages feel assembled from parts: the madwoman, the cold husband, the hidden child, the fire that settles accounts. The coincidences stack high near the end, with documents surfacing just when Margaret needs them and characters confessing just when silence would serve them better. One late revelation about parentage leans on timing that would embarrass a soap opera, even if the emotional payoff mostly justifies it.

Plot logic wobbles in smaller ways too. Winter's rule of no questions goes unenforced whenever the story needs Margaret to know something. The housekeeper sees and hears a great deal and says little until saying it helps. The police and coroners of the period accept accounts that a modern reader will find thin, though to be fair the period did accept thin accounts when the family was gentry and the witnesses were servants. None of this ruined the book for me. It did make me set it down twice in the middle third and read something shorter before coming back.

It is also worth saying who this book will irritate. If you want spare prose and moral ambiguity, look elsewhere. Setterfield picks sides. Cruelty is cruelty here, kindness is kindness, and the people who fail children are judged for it even when they are pitied. If you dislike stories where the past explains everything, the complete accounting at the end may feel too tidy. And if you need your mysteries to play fair in the technical sense, with every clue available before the detective sees it, you will catch Margaret being handed at least one document she did nothing to earn.

For everyone else, and I suspect that is most readers who pick it up, the book delivers exactly what it promises. It is a winter read in the literal sense, best taken in long sittings with bad weather outside. It respects your intelligence without showing off. It takes twins, ghosts, burned houses, and missing manuscripts, the oldest furniture in the genre, and arranges the room well enough that you stop noticing the pieces are secondhand. The final image, of Margaret writing and Winter gone and the shop still standing, stayed with me longer than the solution to the mystery. Stories outlive the people who tell them. Some of them even tell the truth, once, at the end, to exactly one listener who earned it.