Robert Lukens

There's sort of almost a nervousness in Nora coming back to this place because it's a place that we learn she fought so hard to escape.

To me, that's the moment when the novel really starts to sing and we get a sense of what we're going to get here because it's a particular window.

It's in this room and she has memories of sitting by this window as a child.

And it's this kind of old clouded window glass.

And when she was a kid, she used to stare through it

And in the sort of faults of the glass, she would see this mythical landscape of hills and forests and castles.

And she would have these visions of Sir Lancelot and Camelot.

And these are things she inherited from a book of her father's, which becomes a motif through the novel, this poem by Tennyson that we get the title of the novel from.

As a child, she was in love with this vision, sitting in this suburban house looking through a crappy old window, but she saw visions of Camelot.

And it kind of became almost her ideal of love and beauty.

This vision through the window became the life she wanted or the life she dreamed was possible.

But when she arrives there now and she tries to look through this window as an older lady returning, she can't see it.

She just sees a clapped out old window.

Yeah.

I think it's actually set at the time of the novel's publication, which was 78, because I know when Jessica Anderson was, the accusations were constantly thrown at her that this novel was constructed based on autobiography.

She was at pains to point out that her central character was born in 1900 and she wasn't born until 1916, so it can't possibly be her.

Yes.

Yeah, well, it's fascinating, isn't it?

Because it does become this, I think deliberately, not confusing, but these images of Camelot and these images of... She remembers Sir Lancelot going past on his horse with the plume of a feather and the horse trotting by and this...

kind of just becomes this whimsical vision in her head.