Point of View

The novel is told in the third person point of view. The main narrator is Marguerite, a young French woman who is a bound-out girl to the Sargent family. The author tells her story completely from the eyes of Marguerite, never drifting into the thoughts or emotions of the other characters. There are points in the novel in which the author's voice occasionally comes through, giving the reader the impression of another voice or character, but these moments are few.

The point of view of this novel is not as close to the narrating character as modern readers might be accustomed to. The narration is not completely omniscient, keeping the reader from the intimacy common to this point of view. For this reason, the author is able to move around in time quickly and to keep the reader from becoming too close to the main character...