Moody, haunting, and haunted (it's about love among Victorian spiritualists), Affinity is two parts Wilkie Collins, with whose The Woman in White
it shares an obsession with prisons, madness, journal-keeping, and elaborate, carefully engineered deceits; and just a dash of Jeanette
Winterson for up-to-the-minute lesbian-historical-fiction flavor. («He,
she--you ought to know that in the spheres there are no differences like
that.»)