Shy (metaphor)
Edie tells a story of herself saying that she does not have “many friends, not the living, breathing sort at any rate”. She claims that she is not a person who “accumulates friends or enjoys crowds”. But Edie is not lonely, she does not feel herself deprived in any kind of way, as her true friends are words, though not “spoken kind”. Edie feels comfortable “conducting relationships on paper”. Edie is a shy person, but she is fond of books and stories told in literature. It is her world.
Plural/singular (metaphor)
Edie is an observant girl, and it brings her pleasure to notice what ties connected Saffy and Persy. They were not simply sisters; they were twins, and this sibling thing fascinated Edie. It was “the intricate tangle of love and duty and resentment that tied them together”. “The complicated balance of power established over decades” was felt among them and keeps the reader in suspense. Edie says that “they were such a natural group that they made me feel remarkably singular by comparison”. And only looking at them Edie could fully understand what she has been missing, and at the same time she could not understand the rules these two women lived, “they were bound to one another by their habits, their seasonal needs, their biology, their nature, their birth”.
Mother-daughter relationships (metaphor)
Tension between Edie and her mother is felt from the very beginning, and it is even becomes more sensitive when Edie’s mother claims that Edie is a creator of fables, but for Edie it is the same that her mother would call her a liar. Edie is sure that she had visited the Milderhurst castle before, and her mother insists on the opposite. She calls Edie’s story a rejection and says that “rejection is a cancer, Edie. It eats away at a person.” Their relationships are really complicated, but the moment Edie’s mother tells the truth, they become the closest of friends.
