Girtle

Girtle is the novel’s narrator, observer, and emotional center, though she remains an outsider to the story she tells. Fragmentary glimpses into her past suggest a life marked by abandonment and institutionalisation: she was left by her birth parents, briefly adopted, and then discarded again into what may have been an orphanage or an asylum. The ambiguity surrounding the nature of this institution mirrors the ambiguity of Girtle’s identity in the present. Her behaviour, intense social awkwardness, and obsessive tendencies suggest she may be neurodivergent, though the novel never explicitly labels her as such. What is clear is that her early experiences of rejection and systemic cruelty have left her with a distorted sense of what constitutes care or affection. She treats the sisters’ occasional tolerance of her presence, despite their frequent rudeness and dismissal, as proof of sincere connection. Girtle clings to Jody and Mice...