The ending turns out rather depressing for most people except for the heroine. ( )

Ok maybe I have been too hasty in forming my opinion of this book but seriously I just wanted to slap this heroine! She has just finished listening to her sister-in-law relate how their shared, recently deceased brother-in-law Rodric, attempted to rape her and this causes our heroine to start ruminating on how much more attractive Rodric is to her than her own husband. TSTL much? On the other hand, I have to give the author credit because I guess this is exactly the response I would expect from a naive, sheltered, immature 17 year old, so at least her character is authentic. ( )

Susan Howatch is one of my favourite modern authors. She has a fairly terse style without too many adjectives, and yet builds up realistic and sympathetic characters.

In this, one of her early 'gothic' novels, she uses - as she often does - a first person narrative to get inside the mind of the main character, a 17-year-old girl in the 18th century, who finds herself in worrying and mysterious circumstances.

It's something of a thriller, almost in Mary Stewart's genre although without fast chases or exotic settings. It's also a kind of whodunnit, as the narrator gradually pieces together clues, talking to various people in the household and putting her thoughts and discoveries on paper as she writes to her brother. Naturally the puzzle is eventually solved, and everything tidied up, but not without a few shocks of the gothic style.

It's quite a good book; towards the end it became gripping as I felt more and more drawn into the story. On the other hand, it doesn't feel really authentically 18th century. The research is fine; I can't fault the daily routine or the way people dressed or travelled. On the other hand, the conversation and general descriptions sound like those of 20th century people: they don't have the older style inflexions or styles of speech that the better historical authors use so readily.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading it as a bit of escapism. It's not a long book (under 200 pages) and the gothic horror bits aren't unpleasantly gory. ( )

The Shrouded Walls is a "woman in front of the house" book -- in my youth (and perhaps still), the book jackets of such books were prone to feature a young woman in a flowing gown standing in front of a large, menacing dwelling. Plotwise, it has features in common with Georgette Heyer's Regency romances, with the addition of a sense of menace that becomes all too real. But Howatch, at least at that point in her career, did not write historical characters well. Although the protagonists make a marriage of convenience, they seem to talk and think not very differently from their 1960s counterparts in the other two books bound with this one. ( )