Literature / The Thirteenth Tale

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The Thirteenth Tale is a 2006 novel written by Diane Setterfield. The story is about Margaret Lea, an unassuming young biographer who lives with her bookstore owner father. One day she receives a letter from Vida Winter, one of the most prolific and well loved writers alive. Vida Winter has spent all of her public life inventing various stories about her past, but she's close to death, and has chosen Margaret to write the true story of her youth. Margaret has never read any of her books before, and so initially decides to turn her offer down, but after reading some of Vida Winter's books, reconsiders.

What follows is a story of incest, of child abuse and neglect, of a once rich and prosperous family slowly decaying, and the story of two twin girls: Adeline and Emmeline. Margaret becomes entranced by her tale, but finds that as the story is told the truth about Vida Winter's past becomes more and more shrouded in mystery.

The title comes from the first book that Vida Winter ever published - Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation, which only contained twelve stories. The title of subsequent editions of the book was Tales of Change and Desperation, but that didn't stop readers from wanting to know what had happened to that thirteenth tale and what it was about.

The book was adapted into a film in 2013, starring Olivia Colman as Margaret and Vanessa Redgrave as Vida. Sophie Turner and Antonia Clarke played Adeline and Emmeline.

This novel contains:

• Abusive Parents: In just about every form you can imagine. George Angelfield routinely beats Charlie for no reason, simply because he spots the boy and assumes he must have done something to deserve it. He is also implied to have a sexual attraction to his daughter, Isabelle, if not having outright abused her at one point; we also see him attack her so violently that he rips out a chunk of her hair with the skin still attached.
• Adaptation Name Change: The doctor and his wife - Dr. Maudsley became Dr. Mawsley.
• Adaptational Nice Girl: Hester in the books immediately separated the twins with no thought as to how it would hurt them, for the sake of her experiment with the doctor. In the film, she makes an effort to teach Adeline, and only separates them when she's at the end of her rope and is desperate to try something new.
• Adapted Out: George Angelfield is not mentioned in the adaptation.
• Adults Are Useless:
  • The girls' mother and uncle pay no attention to the twins; John-the-dig and Missus do their best, but they are getting older and have duties in the house.
  • The other families surrounding Angelfield do nothing about the girls breaking into their homes and stealing items and food, though they have noted the behavior and frequently state that "something has to be done." This escalates to a point where the girls kidnap a baby and injure it by putting the stroller down a hill. (This is different than the book, where the pram itself is what they're after; they simply take the baby out and leave it on the ground, unharmed.) It's only at this point that Dr. Maudsley intervenes, to prevent Adeline and Emmeline from further menacing the public.
  • The experiment to separate the girls was to ostensibly rehabilitate them before they committed serious harm. As Vida recalls, the doctor and Hester were so absorbed in their research that they ignored the obvious: the girls were missing each other to the point of catatonia, and getting worse, not better.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Vida and Emmeline are horrified when she is forced to lock Adeline in a burning room to save Emmeline's life, and they hear her wailing death screams as she burns alive. Zig-zagged in that it's not confirmed which twin died, and even Vida isn't sure.
• Arc Words: "Tell me the truth." A plucky interviewer asks this of Vida Winter, and her refusal to comply has haunted her for decades. She hopes to atone by finally telling the real truth of her backstory to Margaret Lea. The "interviewer" was actually Emmeline's son, Aurelius, who had long suspected he was a member of the Angelfield family, and pretended to be a reporter to confront her.
  • Also applies to Margaret Lea, as her parents' denial of the existence of her twin sister - her mother in particular - has haunted their family since childhood.
• Ax-Crazy: Adeline, who is described as having violence as her first instinct. She is wildly destructive, doing things like beating Emmeline whenever the notion strikes her and destroying the topiary garden that John-the-dig's family had maintained for the better part of a century, essentially for no reason. It's also heavily implied that she kills John-the-dig, and when Emmeline has her baby and finally stands up to Adeline, she becomes so wild with jealousy and rage that she attempts to kill the child setting the house on fire. This causes both her death - though there's a chance Emmeline died instead - and the destruction of the Angelfield manor.
• Angsty Surviving Twin: Vida Winter is this in a sense. She was forced to kill Adeline by locking her into a burning room to protect Emmeline and her baby, which clearly weighs heavily on her, and that guilt is doubled by the fact that she still doesn't know which twin she actually killed. Played straight with the surviving twin, who has essentially lived in a state of near-catatonia since the death of her sister. This also applies to Margaret herself; she was born a conjoined twin, and her sister died after being severed from her, something which has haunted her for her entire life.
• Apathetic Citizens: The townsfolk keep to themselves, leaving Angelfield manor to fester, and don't trouble themselves about what's taking place there; they don't want to encounter Charlie's wrath after hearing of his reputation. They don't take action until the twins steal the pram with Mary Leigh's baby in it; at this point, they finally decide enough is enough and call Dr. Maudsley for help.
• Bait the Dog: Ambrose seems nice enough, helping out John-the-dig and later managing the house with Vida, after Adeline's tampering leads to John's death. Just when Vida is starting to trust him despite his being an outsider, he sleeps with Emmeline, implied to be a combination of revenge and Replacement Goldfish behavior, due to Vida rejecting his advances. Understandably, Vida fires him for taking advantage of her sister.
• Beauty, Brains, and Brawn: Emmeline, the docile, feminine one; Vida, the only one who isn't touched in the head, but beyond that is highly intelligent and manages to conceal her existence and run Angelfield at the same time; and Adeline, who can and will mess you up. Quite possibly also a Freudian Trio with Adeline and Emmeline as id and sugerego and Vida as ego.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Inverted for the most part. Actually, the prettier a character is, the more likely they are to be insane.
• Birthday Hater: Margaret, because it's the same day she lost her twin sister.
• Big Brother Bully: Charlie. It doesn't work quite the way he planned.
• Big Fancy House: Angelfield before it falls into decay and becomes an Old, Dark House.
• Big Sister Instinct:
  • Rather, twin sister instinct. Emmeline desperately bangs on the window in the room where she's trapped as the doctor and Hester take Adeline away.
  • Vida to Emmeline, repeatedly. She prepares the house for her baby, helps her care for the child, and intervenes when Adeline burns Emmeline's face and tries to kill her. She pulled Emmeline away and locked the door on the burning room, badly scarring her hand.
• Boom, Headshot!: Charlie, self-inflicted.
• Breaking the Cycle of Bad Parenting: Aurelius Love is the only member of the Angelfield family who isn't messed up, because he grows up in a healthy family environment.
• Brother–Sister Incest: Isabelle Angelfield (the twins' mother) and her brother, Charlie. It's heavily implied to be non-consensual; when Isabelle attempts to leave to go to the picnic, Charlie grabs her forcefully by the hair, attempting to drag her into his room, with the implication that he does this often. The girls may also be his daughters.
• Cassandra Truth: Missus in the film keeps saying the figure in white is a ghost. Hester and the doctor dismiss her. It's actually either Vida or the real Adeline, while the other girl was playing with Emmeline.
• The Charmer: Ambrose Proctor. He manages to convince the solicitor that there's nothing to worry about and later tells Vida that what he said to the solicitor was completely false. At some point soon after, he seduces and impregnates Emmeline.
• Chekhov's Gun: The gun Charlie keeps in his desk drawer, which he briefly considers turning on himself after Isabelle runs away with Roland. He uses the same gun to kill himself after he receives word of her death.
• Cigarette of Anxiety: In the film, Vida holds one when she finds John-the-dig's body.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: The real Adeline takes this to murderous levels, killing Missus, John the Dig and attempting to do the same to Emmeline's baby.
• Clock King: Hester the governess.
• Conjoined Twins: It turns out that Margaret was born a conjoined twin; her sister didn't survive the operation to separate them.
• Creator Breakdown: In-universe, this is why Vida never finished or published her thirteenth tale; it was a retelling of her birth and abandonment, which ended with a toddler left at the estate of her mother's rapist.
• Creepy Twins: Adeline and Emmeline, due in part to Parental Neglect.
• Dark Secret: The Missus and John-the-dig can't let anyone know there is a third girl in Angelfield, or else Charlie's rapes and incest will become open public knowledge, and Vida points out that she would have no right to stay.
• Dead Person Impersonation: Vida took over Adeline's life after accidentally killing the latter, so as to take care of Emmeline and the Angelfield affairs. Margaret eventually figures out she isn't the real Adeline.
• Didn't Think This Through: Mrs. Mordesley goes along to Angelfield to notify the parents about Adeline and Emmeline injuring a baby. She starts getting creeped out by how the house is so empty and cluttered; instead of turning around and leaving, perhaps coming with her husband, she keeps going deeper inside. This means she's alone when someone in white attacks her.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: A variant; in the book, Missus died from old age, peacefully in her sleep. Adeline pushes her down the stairs in the movies.
• Disappeared Dad: The twins' father dies sometime around their birth. Charlie may be their actual father, but he's just as emotionally absent.
• Don't Split Us Up:
  • Charlie didn't react well to the doctor sending Isabelle to the asylum, so much that when they find Charles has gone, and Vida finds his body, John-the-dig vows to tell no one because the doctor could send the Missus away just as easily.
  • Adeline and Emmeline react very badly to being separated. Vida helps Emmeline through this, though. Vida later has this with Emmeline.
• Doppelgänger Replacement Love Interest: The new gardener, Ambrose, does this with Emmeline. He's actually in love with Vida, but Vida rejects him, and he sleeps with Emmeline to get back at her.
• Doorstop Baby: Aurelius Love; Vida leaves him to a kindly woman, Joan Love, to save him from Adeline's wrath. Vida herself also qualifies; her mother is one of Charlie's many rape victims, and was abandoned at Angelfield when her mother either wouldn't or couldn't care for her any longer.
• Dysfunctional Family: The Angelfields, very, very much so. From neglectful and abusive parents, to repeated sexual abuse, to a sadistic, unloved child and his self-harming sister, the family has this in spades.
• The Ending Changes Everything: The "Eureka!" Moment that Margaret gets after hearing from Aurelius Love that bones were found at Angelfield: Vida is neither Adeline nor Emmeline, but a third girl-child, Charlie's daughter born of rape, whom the Missus and John took in. She left Aurelius on Mrs. Love's doorstep after Adeline tried to kill Aurelius as a baby, for his safety.
• Establishing Character Moment: Through Margaret, the reader learns that Vida is one of the most acclaimed writers in history, she never tells the truth about her own past, and her house is dead silent. Then we meet the woman and in the first conversation:
  Vida Winter: Don't be so polite. If there's one thing I can't abide, it's politeness.
• Ethereal White Dress: Emmeline wears white after the fire, driven insane by the loss of Adeline and her baby. It's also a "woman in white" that attacks the doctor's wife; while Isabelle takes the fall, it's strongly implied that the culprit was actually Adeline or Vida.
• Everyone Has Standards: Despite the twins being reckless, they did all they could to hide Vida from concerned authorities, and not mentioning her to Hester or the doctor. Sometimes Emmeline slips up by saying "we" instead of "I," but the adults easily dismiss it.
• Famed in Story: Vida Winter.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Vida refers to Isabelle strictly by her first name, because Isabelle is not her mother.
  • As Margaret makes note of, at a certain point in the story, Vida begins using "we" and "I" instead of referring to "the girls" generally. This is because it's around this time that she begins living as herself, instead of pretending to be Adeline.
  • Emmeline's insistence on using the "we" pronoun after Hester separates her from Adeline is because she actually was with another girl, her half-sister Vida.
• Frame-Up: When the doctor's wife visits Angelfield, a woman in white attacks her with a violin and knocks her unconscious. Isabelle is blamed due to her history of mental health issues, as well as the fact that she's wearing a pale-colored dress (though it's yellow instead of white), but it's implied that the attacker was actually Adeline or Vida, more likely Adeline as she has a noted history of violent behavior.
• Framing Device: Though the frame is Margaret's story in its own right as she goes through her own discovery and development, the business of writing a biography is mainly to tell the story of Vida's past.
• Free-Range Children: Emmeline and Adeline go wherever they want to in the village because the Missus and John-the-dig are too busy taking care of a huge house and too old to keep up with them. Deconstructed when this gets them in trouble with the local doctor.
• Gentle Giant: Aurelius Love.
• Grimmification: In-universe, Vida's thirteen tales are dark fairy tale rewrites, the last being of Cinderella getting raped and impregnated, never marrying her prince, and eventually abandoning her child to be raised by him.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Adeline is very easily set off. When she gets jealous, she is downright murderous. Just ask Missus and John-the-Dig.
• Hard Truth Aesop: The novel and film emphasize that sometimes your family of blood can suck, and you can be trapped in an endless cycle of violence and affection. The only way to get out is to create a Family of Choice with people who truly love you.
• Heroic Bastard: Aurelius Love. And Vida Winter.
• Hope Spot: Things seem to calm down after Charlie dies. John-the-dig takes over parenting the girls, hires a boy to help out in the yard while he takes care of the house and even gives Vida a topiary lesson. They even bond together as she starts trimming with caution. Adeline then kills John-the-dig for the crime of showing Vida some attention, and said boy gets Emmeline pregnant.
• How We Got Here: Vida tells Margaret the story of her life from her birth to the fire at Angelfield when she was 17.
• Idiot Ball: Even horribly burned and mentally fragile, it shouldn't be that hard to identify which twin survived as Emmeline had recently given birth.
• Important Haircut: Vida asks Margaret to give her one after she tells the story of John-the-dig's death and has an emotional breakdown.
• Intergenerational Friendship: Zig-zagged with Margaret (20s or 30s) and Vida (late 70s); their relationship is very tense and cold, generally maintaining the boundaries of an eccentric and their biographer, but marked by moments of genuine connection such as when Margaret holds Vida and comforts her as she cries over the death of John-the-dig.
  • Played straight with Margaret and Aurelius (60s); they form a genuine connection due to their lack of a true mother (Margaret's mother is emotionally unavailable, and while Aurelius had a good mother figure in Mrs. Love, he mourns the loss of his biological family), and he is the only person we see Margaret emotionally vulnerable with. When she has a nightmare following her birthday, the memory of Aurelius gives her comfort and security.
• Insane Equals Violent: Isabelle, who has a history of mental health issues, attacks the doctor's wife. It is implied that this was actually Adeline or even Vida.
  • Adeline fits this to a T; both she and Emmeline are "not quite right," but while Emmeline subverts this due to her placidity and docile nature, Adeline completely embodies it with her fits of anger and destructive streak.
• It Runs in the Family: Madness seems to be a family trait. George, Charlie, Isabelle, and the twins are all off. Vida is the Only Sane Man as Charlie's daughter and even she has instances of it.
• Karmic Death: Adeline tried to kill Emmeline's baby by setting him on fire before Vida took him away from Angelfield for his safety. Adeline then dies in the fire that she lit... maybe.
• Kids Are Cruel: Emmeline and Adeline have zero empathy for other people and casually destroy precious things and endanger infants, though later discoveries about their personalities suggest that the extremely passive and harmless Emmeline likely went along with it out of thoughtlessness, with Adeline being the sadist. Averted with Vida, who causes no harm while in the house apart from Green-Eyed Monster moments.
• Look Both Ways: How Margaret's twin died in the adaptation.
• Love Triangle: Dr. Maudsley falls in love with Hester Barrow while he is still married. He later joins her in America after his wife's death.
• Madwoman in the Attic: Both Charlie Angelfield and his father, George, go mad after the death of their loved ones, and enter into a sort of self-inflicted imprisonment where they lock themselves in their rooms for extended periods of time. George gets better, Charlie doesn't.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: John-the-dig appears to have fallen from his ladder. Adeline fiddled with the safety catch.
• Mama Bear:
  • Missus and John-the-dig hide Vida from Charlie and Isabelle, knowing that they would have cast her out as being evidence of Charlie's rapes. Later, they refuse to tell Hester or the doctor about the third child in the house, for worries she'd be taken away with no legal guardian.
  • When Adeline threatens Emmeline's baby, Emmeline goes on the attack for the first time in her life.
  • Vida intervenes when Adeline tries to burn Emmeline's child alive. She quickly fetches him from the fireplace, wraps him in a blanket, and calms him down before taking him to a house nearby and leaving him on the doorstep. She then goes back after the fire to make sure the person answering the door actually takes him in; in the film it's implied if no one had, Vida would have fetched Aurelius back.
• Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: From the start there is speculation as to whether the father of Isabelle's children is Charlie or her husband Roland, though evidence leans more toward Charlie being the father.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": In the film, Charlie, Missus, and John-the-dig share this expression when they see Isabelle appear in white, and Dr. Mordesley sees the scars on her arm. John-the-dig was before saying it was most likely the girls who had attacked the doctor's wife, but Mrs. Mordesley logically points out the girls were outside at the time. Thus, the evidence seems to implicate Isabelle.
• Maybe Ever After: Margaret and Dr. Clifton.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The ghost of Angelfield. This turns out to be a perfectly ordinary third girl living in the house.
• Meaningful Rename: Both Vida and Winter point to a theme of emptiness and death, though Vida means "life" in Spanish. Vida admits she doesn't know what her real name is when Margaret realizes that Vida isn't Adeline.
• Missing Mom: Isabelle's mother died giving birth to her; Isabelle herself vanishes from her children's lives when the doctor sends her to an asylum. Margaret's mom is emotionally absent. The ultimate one is that no one knows who Vida's mother is.
• Morally Ambiguous Doctorate: Downplayed with Dr. Mordesley, who immediately sent off Isabelle to the asylum for ostensibly attacking his wife (which is understandable if an abrupt course of action). With Hester they concocted an experiment to rehabilitate the twins by separating them, without paying mind to the twins' mutual Heroic BSoD. Vida subtly chews him out for this later when she has to go to him for help after John-the-dig's death.
• My God, What Have I Done?: In the film, Charlie has this expression when the doctor sees Isabelle's scars and sees them as a reason to commit her, along with her being the most likely person who attacked Mrs. Mordesley. Even so, he doesn't confess that he cut up Isabelle or bothers to defend her.
• My Master, Right or Wrong: Deconstructed. John-the-dig and Missus are the only servants left in the house because they aren't afraid of Charlie, or the twins. That means they reluctantly go along with whatever Charlie, the doctor, or Hester say, even if it's not in the girls' best interest, as shown when John-the-dig in the film helps separate them but says it won't end well. It means that the twins come to no longer trust either adult. It's implied that them being firmer with Vida helped her become more normal because she wasn't allowed to run free, and them hiding her from everyone meant they could control her upbringing.
• Never Recycle a Building: The Angelfield manor has been completely abandoned for decades after the fire; it's only very recently that some half-hearted demolition efforts were initiated, though they're promptly halted when they find human remains in the library. Aside from Margaret, the only frequent visitor to the location is Aurelius.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Adeline gave one to Emmeline when they saw each other again, for no discernible reason. When a shocked Margaret asks why, Vida replies that she doesn't know, despite knowing Adeline better than anyone.
  • Emmeline gives a good one back to Adeline after she attempts to burn her baby alive.
• No Name Given: Vida when she was younger.
• Non-Indicative Title: Vida's book Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation notoriously does not have thirteen tales. Vida's story is meant to be the thirteenth.
• Occam's Razor: Subverted; no one except Margaret comes to the simple conclusion after Hester thinks she's seen one of the girls running around when they're both locked up: that Angelfield has three girls instead of two. Hester instead thinks she's going mad.
• Oh, Crap!: In the film, the girls have this expression when seeing their mother being escorted out of Angelfield by medics, to spend the rest of her days at an asylum.
• Once More, with Clarity: Late in the adaptation, the scene where Adeline and Emmeline are playing by the fallen tree is shown again, but there is a third girl there, who would become Vida. The scenes of the doctor's wife and the deaths of Missus and John-the-dig are shown again, with the real Adeline as the perpetrator.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: John-the-dig's legal name is John Digence, but Vida insists that if you really knew him, you knew that John-the-dig was his real name.
• Only Sane Man:
  • John-the-dig and Vida as a girl-child, especially considering that Missus becomes blind and raving as time goes by. The film expands on this when John-the-dig emphasizes that the girls were more likely to attack Mrs. Mordesley than Isabelle, even if they have an alibi supposedly. In Margaret's story, Dr. Clifton qualifies.
  • Hester presents herself as one in her diary, but this could be conflated arrogance due to her intellect.
• OOC Is Serious Business: The movie shows John-the-dig as a Perpetual Frowner, and we see him only look happy when Adeline asks for a lesson in topiary figures. It wasn't Adeline, but Vida who physically resembled her as a child and teen and whom John-the-dig personally raised.
• Oop North: The story takes place in Yorkshire.
• The Ophelia: Isabelle; she is noted for her captivating beauty and her unpredictable mental state. This is highlighted by an incident where she jumps into a lake at a picnic while wearing a light summer frock, similar to that which Ophelia is commonly depicted wearing.
• Parental Abandonment:
  • Aurelius was left on a doorstep as a baby.
  • Vida's mother is implied to have abandoned her by the Angelfield house.
  • Vida writes about this in her "thirteenth tale," about Cinderella leaving her daughter at the estate of her rapist.
• Parental Favoritism: George very much preferred Isabelle over Charlie.
• Parental Incest: It's implied that George Angelfield at least had a sexual interest in his daughter, if not outright abused her. Certainly, when she ran off, his reaction was more like a spurned lover than a father.
• Parental Neglect: Charlie was ignored by both his parents. The twins were ignored by Isabelle.
  • Margaret's mother is emotionally absent, and has been since the death of Margaret's sister. Margaret laments that her mother doesn't love her and never will.
• Parental Substitute: The twins and Vida were raised by the Missus and John-the-dig, as Charlie and Isabelle were much too wrapped up in their own world to do so. John-the-dig in particular vows to be this when Charlie goes missing, and he starts to teach Vida how to care for the garden.
• Pen Name: Vida Winter is a pen name for Adeline March. This isn't actually true; Vida doesn't appear to have a name until after the fire.
• Perspective Flip: On the story within a story.
• Platonic Life-Partners: The Missus and John-the-dig. Vida believes that they'd have been lovers if they'd lived in a different time, but she was older and social conventions got in the way.
• Polar Opposite Twins: The twins — one is totally passive, the other wickedly violent.
• Promoted to Parent: Vida ends up having to run Angelfield after Adeline kills John-the-dig.
• Properly Paranoid: John-the-dig about Hester and her approach to running the house. He thinks that she's no good and full of herself. John-the-dig is proven right; Hester's experiments prove more harmful than beneficial in the long run.
• Railing Kill: Poor Missus in the film, thanks to Adeline.
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • Mrs. Mordesley, believe it or not. She's established as a gossip, but she wants to go in and talk to the girls' mother about them injuring a baby, perhaps gently convincing them to hire a governess. When someone attacks her, she's adamant it wasn't the twins based on pure logic: they were outside at the time, or at least either Vida or Adeline was with Emmeline. Later, she's willing to take in Adeline, a wild child, for humoring her husband's experiments, in the hopes of reforming her. Mrs. Mordesley puts her foot down when she catches Hester and the doctor kissing in Adeline's room, and tells them both off. While this led to Hester leaving, Dr. Mordesley knows she's right and spends the rest of his wife's life making it up to her.
  • The Angelfield attorney is also this. He helps the doctor arrange for a governess when the girls get in trouble and is relieved when a visibly-older Adeline can talk to him about John-the-dig's death and her uncle's whereabouts, as well as who will take care of the girls. It was actually Vida, but the point still stands.
• Reclusive Artist: Vida Winter is very much an In-Universe example. She never allows anyone into her home, and whenever she speaks to reporters, she concocts elaborate lies about her childhood. No one knows anything about her, despite her outselling every book except for the Bible
• Remarried to the Mistress: Dr. Maudsley and Hester in the end, though this only occurs after the death of his first wife.
• The Reveal: An epic one, via an "Eureka!" Moment on Margaret's part; specifically, that there were three little girls at Angelfield and Vida Winter isn't the real Adeline March.
• Rewatch Bonus: Misses looks nervous in the film when talking to Hester about the ghost in the house. She's lying to protect Vida, the third girl-child.
• Rule of Three: A core tenant of the novel; Vida even mentions it by name at one point, and it comes up frequently throughout. There are three sections of the novel (Beginnings, Middles, and Endings); Margaret asks Vida for three facts to verify her story; Mrs. Love makes a mistake with her knitting three times (first when her husband dies, then when her sister dies, and lastly when Vida leaves Aurelius on her doorstep); and, most notably, there are not two children living at Angelfield, but three.
• Room Full of Crazy: Charlie had a part of the grounds which was adorned with necklaces and other feminine objects, where he would rape Isabelle. Later on, Vida finds him there, dead of a self-inflicted shotgun blast.
  • His rooms also count, as the family discovers when Charlie goes missing; they are filled up with debris, and all manners of human waste, including blood from his self-harming.
• Samus Is a Girl: When John-the-dig and Missus rescued the then-nameless Vida, they mistook her for a boy because she was wearing trousers, a hat, and many layers of dirt. After bathing her, they realized the child was a girl, and Charlie's.
• Scars Are Forever:
  • Vida has a key-shaped burn on her hand from the fire at Angelfield. Said burn is from locking Adeline in a burning room.
  • Emmeline has burn scars on her face from the fire as well, caused by Adeline shoving her face-first onto a burning chair.
• Scatterbrained Senior: The Missus as the years go on; part of the severe disrepair of the house is due to her being the only housekeeper left, and she is already experiencing mental decline even before the girls reach their teen years.
• Screaming Birth: Emmeline when she gives birth to her baby.
• Seamless Spontaneous Lie: Vida and Ambrose Proctor make one after John-the-dig's death to prevent anyone inquiring about Uncle Charlie, with Vida saying he's in Peru and Ambrose saying that his grandmother will be checking in on the house. The grandmother doesn't actually exist.
• Shout-Out: Both explicitly and implicitly to Jane Eyre.
• Spared by the Adaptation: Margaret's sister Moira. The book has her die as a result of separating them after they were conjoined. The adaptation has her live up to school age, where she was killed while walking in the street.
• Split Personality: Hester and Dr. Maudsley suspect Adeline of having one, as Hester notes that there is a "girl in the mist" that sometimes takes over Adeline; this girl is studious, cunning, and much calmer than Adeline's standard behavior. They conduct their experiment on the girls specifically to draw this girl out of Adeline, in hopes of a Split-Personality Takeover. This is wholly averted by the reveal that Vida isn't Adeline, but a third, unnamed girl-child in the house. The behavioral changes are due to Vida occasionally impersonating Adeline.
• The Spock: Hester Barrow.
• Spotting the Thread: John-the-dig found the young "Vida" because whenever she stole food or tried to get water, she didn't turn off the tap properly.
• Stepford Smiler: Margaret's mother; the death of one of her daughters has left her mentally unwell, capable only of superficial conversation. Margaret notes that she sleeps in the guest room, not with her husband.
• Story Within a Story: The Angelfield family's decay alongside Margaret's tenuous friendship with Vida Winter.
• Suspiciously Specific Tense: More Suspiciously Specific Pronoun when Vida starts saying I instead of referring to Adeline in the third person. As it turns out, this is a clue that she and Adeline are different people.
• Switching P.O.V.: The retelling of Hester's time at Angelfield via her diary.
• Taking the Heat: Isabelle says that she cut herself to keep the doctor from investigating Charlie. This gets her locked up in an asylum on suspicion of attacking Mrs. Mordesley.
• Teen Pregnancy: Emmeline (age 17) gives birth to Aurelius Love, the bastard offspring of her and Ambrose Proctor.
• Through His Stomach: Aurelius Love will befriend pretty much anyone by giving them food first. Helps that he's a Supreme Chef.
• Token Good Teammate: Vida was this among the Angelfield girls. John-the-dig and Missus raised her, which is why she's more emotionally stable than Adeline or Emmeline. She was never violent, except when she sought to protect Emmeline's baby, and did her best to take care of her sisters.
• Too Clever by Half: Hester. A governess with medical and psychological knowledge wanting to "save" two mentally-stunted twin girls by engaging in a controversial experiment . . . and she doesn't think through the emotional consequences of such an experiment, or the mundane possibilities after seeing one out of the house.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior:
  • Charlie was sadistic and violent from a young age, doing things like pressing pins into soap and removing floorboards to cause the servants to trip and injure themselves. This escalated to full on beating and raping his sister, Isabelle, who was 9 years his junior.
  • Isabelle also expressed a bizarre fascination with pain, due in no small part to the implied abuse from both her father and Charlie; as a child, Charlie once attempted to take out his sadistic urges on her by cutting her with a rusted wire, but this led to her developing a fixation with self-harm that followed her into adulthood.
  • When Adeline and Emmeline were children, they stole Mary Jameson's baby, who was in a stroller and let it run loose down a hill. This is portrayed in the film, with the baby crying in pain. This, in fact, was why the doctor and Hester got involved with the girls.
  • Adeline nearly burns Emmeline's baby alive while the latter is sleeping. Vida has to intervene to save her nephew.
• Twincest: Emmeline and Adeline's relationship has very strong incestuous overtones, as does the relationship between Emmeline and (nameless during that time) Vida Winter.
• Twin Switch: Played With; while Vida is not biologically a twin, she looks identical enough to get away with impersonating Adeline frequently.
• Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Mathilde is said to be incredibly beautiful while George is nothing special, as emphasized by their first child Charlie being something of a potato.
• The Ugly Guy's Hot Daughter: Isabelle has her mother's beauty and her father's coloring, making her extraordinarily beautiful.
• Uncanny Family Resemblance: The Angelfield children share red hair and green eyes; this also applies to Vida, despite having a different mother than Adeline and Emmeline.
• The Un-Favorite: Charlie. When his father George loses his wife, he completely retreats into himself and does not take notice or concern about his son. It's only when the Missus brings him the infant Isabelle that he recovers from his stupor, but Charlie essentially becomes a ghost to him.
• Unreliable Narrator: Both in and out of universe. Vida has a reputation for lying to people about her life story, so much so that Margaret refuses to work on this project without independently verifiable sources. Also, certain details of Vida's story raise questions for the reader, such as whether it was Emmeline or Adeline she saved from the fire.
• The Un-Reveal: We ultimately never find out if Adeline or Vida attacked the doctor's wife with a violin, or if it was Isabelle.
• The Unsolved Mystery: Margaret never figures out how the treasure box was taken safely from the house. Likewise, the true parentage of the twins is left ambiguous, though it's very heavily implied that Charlie is their father, making Vida their half-sister instead of their cousin. In addition, it remains unclear whether or not it was Adeline who died in the fire. Even Vida is unsure, and Margaret spends the rest of the book dancing around calling the surviving twin "Emmeline." Furthermore, Vida never finds out who her mother is, though she and Margaret are both fairly certain she was one of Charlie's rape victims, thus why Vida was abandoned at Angelfield.
  • It shouldn't be too hard to figure out which twin died in the fire, as Emmeline had given birth no more than a few months before the fire...
• Vorpal Pillow: In the adaptation, the real Adeline attempts to murder Aurelius by smothering him before Vida sees her.
• Wham Line: Once upon a time there were two baby girls... Or, alternatively: once upon a time there were three.
• Wham Shot: After the girls are separated, Hester goes for a walk outside...and sees two girls that look like them running on the forest path. She goes Oh, Crap! and runs to the doctor's house, only to see Adeline sitting quietly in the room. Hester doesn't know what to think. It was Vida cheering up Emmeline about the separation.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • As children, Adeline and her twin Emmeline completely destroy John-the-dig's garden, leaving him heartbroken. The Missus too doesn't understand, and demands the girls explain why they did it. As it turns out, Vida had nothing to do with this and in fact helps John restore the garden.
  • Margaret to Vida for abandoning Aurelius, even though Vida knows what it's like to be abandoned; Vida's explanation puts everything into perspective.
• When She Smiles: A woman in the village commonly called Merrily is very plain, but she is considered beautiful when she laughs because of the sound.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: Margaret writes one: Hester moved to America, where the doctor found and married her after becoming a widower; Aurelius has reunited with his sister and her family, and she has decided to go on a holiday with Dr. Clifton.
• Wild Child: Adeline and Emmeline don't grow up in the wilderness raised by animals, but the fact that neither was really "raised" by anyone at all makes them both quite feral in many ways. Emmeline has the innocence often associated with this, though Adeline's ferocity turns out to be pure psychopathy.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • Hester and the doctor do psychological damage to the twins that isn't easily undone by separating them.
  • Adeline is so jealous of Emmeline's baby that she's almost certainly going to kill him if they're kept in the same house.
• Write What You Know: In-Universe; the reason Vida Winter picked Margaret to write her biography despite the fact that she's relatively unknown and has only written a couple of articles, is because she "seemed to know something about siblings", namely, twin siblings.
• Wrongfully Committed: Charlie has been cutting scars on Isabelle's wrists since they were kids. She still has the marks, and lies to a doctor that she did them. This gets her committed to an insane asylum.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Vida Winter can never return to Angelfield because of her guilt over what occurred there, including the fact that she still doesn't know whether it was Adeline or Emmeline who truly died there. She legally changes her name to Vida Winter to separate herself from Angelfield entirely.