Wing of Azrael, Volume 3

Viola has endured years of a marriage that has become a prison. When she finally finds a kindred spirit in Sibella Lincoln, she begins to imagine another way to live. But her husband Philip's jealousy has curdled into something murderous and controlling. He threatens to confine her entirely if she continues to meet Harry Lancaster, the man who has shown her what kindness might feel like. In this devastating conclusion to Caird's trilogy, the question becomes unbearable: what does a woman owe to a society that has offered her nothing but chains? The prose burns with quiet fury, laying bare the domestic hell that Victorian marriage truly was - not through melodrama, but through the slow suffocation of a woman taught to hate herself for wanting to breathe. Caird, a radical feminist who publicly challenged the institution of marriage in her own time, refuses easy answers. This is a novel about the impossible choices facing women who were told that obedience was their only virtue, and who discovered that freedom might cost everything they had left.