“He called me his muse, his destiny. He said that he had known at once, when he saw me through the hazy gaslight of the theater foyer on Drury Lane. I was his muse, his destiny. And he was mine.”

The prologue narrated by the young woman who will be revealed as Birdie (also known as Lily) introduces the love affair and the tragic loss at the center of the novel, the heart of the mystery around which the book will revolve. Edward’s obsession with Lily confuses his passion for art with his passion for a person, while the setting of the theatre that Birdie will play the part of Lily.

“In the story that her mother used to tell, the house has been a literal gateway to another world; for Elodie, though, curled up in her mother’s arms, breathing in the exotic fragrance of narcissus that she wore, the story itself had been a gateway, an incantation that carried her away from the here and now and into the land of imagination.”

Young Elodie’s captivation by the bedtime story her mother told illustrates the power of story, a power to which Lucy speaks and which Birdie dwells on at the end. The story of the Fairy Queen twines throughout the novel as a pervasive motif. Like Birchwood, a protective house, the story itself offers solace for Elodie’s grieving heart.

“People used [nostalgia] as a stand-in for sentimentality, when it wasn’t that at all. Sentimentality was mawkish and cloying, where nostalgia was acute and aching. It described yearning of the most profound kind: an awareness that time’s passage could not be stopped and there was no going back to reclaim a moment or a person or to do things differently.”

In a novel about looking back and the impact history can have, especially in what passes from one generation to another, Elodie draws a distinction between romanticizing about the past and being more deeply touched by it. The preoccupation with the past, and how a future might have been different if an event had turned out otherwise, is a preoccupation shared among several key characters across the various timelines.