Hungerstone

Set in 1888, the novel is narrated by Lady Lenore Crowther, a 30-year-old aristocratic woman married to Henry Crowther, a wealthy Sheffield steel industrialist. Lenore has spent their 10-year marriage serving as the architect of Henry's social ascent, managing every detail of their household with obsessive precision. Orphaned at 12 when her parents were killed in a carriage accident, she was raised by her sole surviving relative, Aunt Daphne, in a stifling, isolated house near Berkeley Square. Lenore learned to survive by suppressing all desire and mastering every situation, a habit she carried into a loveless, childless marriage built on a transactional exchange of her aristocratic name for Henry's money.

As the Crowthers prepare to leave London for Nethershaw, a medieval estate Henry has acquired on the Derbyshire moors, Lenore has a vivid sleep paralysis episode: a shadow approaches her bed, and a beautiful young woman with chestnut hair lies beside her, strokes her body, and bites her neck. She wakes to find no one there. Henry announces he is hosting a shooting party for investors at Nethershaw in just two and a half weeks, leaving Lenore to prepare the decrepit house alone. At the train station, a journalist named Laurence Gibson accosts Lenore, asking about rumors that safety conditions at Henry's Ajax Works have declined. Henry angrily intervenes and threatens Gibson.

On the rain-soaked road to Nethershaw, they discover an overturned carriage. Henry and the groom pull out an unconscious woman in white, a sight that triggers Lenore's childhood trauma. She faints. At Nethershaw, a crumbling stone house surrounded by bleak moorland, a local doctor examines the stranger and reports heart concerns requiring rest. When Lenore enters the woman's darkened room, she is struck dumb: The rescued stranger is the woman from her dream. The woman introduces herself as Carmilla Kernstein, addressing Lenore with unsettling intimacy while refusing to reveal where she was traveling or who her family is. Lenore searches Debrett's Peerage, a directory of the British aristocracy, and other references but finds no record of the Kernstein name.

Lenore throws herself into restoring Nethershaw, managing a skeleton staff, leaking roofs, collapsing plaster, and spoiled provisions. Meanwhile, Carmilla recovers and draws Lenore into an increasingly intimate connection. Lenore opens up about her orphaning and her disappointing marriage, and Carmilla listens with piercing attention, telling Lenore: "You dismiss yourself. Do not" (46). The servants report seeing Carmilla walking the corridors at night, and Lenore discovers her maid Molly in a trance-like state beside Carmilla's bed, eating strands of Carmilla's hair. Lenore orders the incident forgotten but is deeply unsettled.

Henry brings Cora Lamb, Lenore's younger and socially confident friend, to Nethershaw uninvited. Carmilla provokes Lenore by suggesting Henry and Cora are having an affair. Henry visits Lenore's bed for the first time in over a year, but Lenore recognizes the encounter as manipulation designed to keep her compliant. A pattern of disturbing events escalates around the estate: A maid is dismissed after devouring four game pies in a frenzy. On a walk, Lenore discovers a farm girl crouching in a chicken coop, mouth bloody, tearing into a dead hen. In the village of Hathersage, she enters a cottage and finds a woman frying meat carved from her own husband's arm. Both women offer the same hollow explanation: They were terribly hungry.

Henry takes Lenore to the Ajax Works to display her before potential investors. She witnesses a grinding wheel explode, driving shrapnel through a worker's jaw; Henry treats the accident as routine. When Lenore later hand-delivers a letter from Henry to the widow of a worker killed at the factory, she discovers it denies compensation and blames the worker for his own death. Confronted by Lenore, Cora reveals she has been helping Henry because her father is a Home Office minister. Workers have gone to a journalist at the Manchester Guardian claiming Henry has never paid a single compensation case. Cora insists she is not Henry's lover.

Lenore's mysterious illness worsens. Carmilla repeatedly asks Lenore what she wants, a question that triggers panic because Lenore has never permitted herself to want anything. One evening, Carmilla knocks a tin of pastilles, sugar-coated sweets Henry regularly gives Lenore, from her hands and warns: "You are feeding the wrong hunger" (173). Searching Henry's room, Lenore discovers stacks of pastille tins and a half-empty bag of white powder from a chemist. A medical compendium confirms the symptoms of chronic arsenic poisoning match her illness exactly. Henry has been slowly poisoning her.

The revelation shatters Lenore's remaining defenses. Carmilla refuses to tell Lenore what to do, instead demanding she articulate her own desires. Their confrontation turns physical: Carmilla pushes Lenore until Lenore shoves back. The encounter breaks something open, and Lenore kisses Carmilla. They have sex in an encounter that is violent, tender, and transformative, and Lenore experiences pleasure and agency she has never known. Afterward, she sobs for the years of her dead life. Lenore also recalls a buried secret: Shortly after their first wedding anniversary, Henry shot and killed Lord Abney during a shooting party after Abney mocked his working-class origins. Lenore witnessed the killing and fabricated a story of an accident, binding herself and Henry together in complicity.

When Lenore wakes to find Carmilla gone, with only a note promising to return, she spirals. She gorges on food, throws a wineglass at Henry, and is locked in her bedroom. Alone and feverish, she descends into consuming hunger, eating wallpaper, gnawing chair legs, and chewing bedsheets. She understands now the connection between herself and the other women driven to monstrous appetite: Carmilla's presence provokes a ravenous hunger in those around her, one that mirrors the emotional starvation they all share.

Carmilla returns at night. Lenore smashes her window and escapes. They spend the evening in Sheffield, attending a theater and a supper club where Lenore spots Henry with another woman. In a churchyard, Lenore declares she wants revenge. Carmilla advises her not to poison Henry in return but to play her own game.

Lenore acts methodically. She swaps Henry's arsenic for powdered sugar, searches his study, and finds years of correspondence proving he has systematically denied every compensation claim while advertising generous payouts to attract investors. She writes a detailed letter exposing Henry's poisoning and business fraud, addressed "To be opened in the event of my untimely death" (272).

On a walk along Stanage Edge, a cliff on the Derbyshire moors, Lenore spots Henry's diamonds around Cora's neck and confronts her. Cora backs toward the edge, and her footing gives way. Lenore grabs Cora's shirt but, consumed by rage and a new sense of power, does not pull her to safety. Cora falls to her death. Lenore constructs a story of an accident. When Detective Inspector Lacey arrives to investigate, Lenore meets him privately and hands over her sealed letter as insurance against Henry.

At the shooting party, Lenore performs brilliantly as hostess. She reveals to Henry that she has discovered and neutralized the poison and placed the incriminating letter with Lacey. Henry retaliates by threatening to have her committed to an asylum and demanding a divorce. He reveals that Cora was never his lover: The diamonds were a gift for her help with the Ajax cover-up. The knowledge that Cora was innocent strikes Lenore, but she does not waver.

Lenore refuses Henry's terms. Violence erupts on the moors: Lenore claws his face, then chases him across the heather in feral pursuit. She catches him, pins him down, and tears out his throat with her teeth. When the shooting party discovers the scene, the estate's poorly trained hunting dogs have already descended on the body, their muzzles bloody. The guests and police accept the explanation that the dogs attacked Henry. A fine carriage arrives, and Carmilla steps out in red silk to claim Lenore from the stunned crowd, extending her hand: "Come, my dear. You must be so terribly hungry" (317).