Despite living 50 years apart, Isabel and Lilian both experience limitations and constraints that are imposed on them due to their gender. As an upper-class Victorian woman, Isabel faces the most explicit constraints. She is bound by her father’s authority and recognizes that “I was little more than a trinket to him, to be traded away to the highest bidder” (223). While her primary purpose is to become a wife and mother, she is not free to choose her own partner. She cannot marry the man she loves without her father’s consent, and she ends up being physically confined to her house in order to conceal her pregnancy.

Lilian has more freedom: She can pursue romantic and sexual relationships with the men of her choosing, forge a professional path, and move freely between cities. Nonetheless, she still encounters significant limitations: She is not free to vote, and when she was faced with an unwanted pregnancy, she had to obtain an abortion illegally. The men in her life, even though they love her, struggle to fully understand her complexities. Lilian eventually confides to Isabel that both her father and Harry initially “kept [her] small though it was not with any malice on their part” (381). Lilian’s quest to solve the mystery represents one of the first times she experiences complete freedom, despite the risks this project carries.

As the novel’s antagonist, Julia represents the warped nature that can occur when gendered expectations are carried to their extreme. Julia obsessively tries to embody the roles that Lilian and Isabel interrogate and reject. She strives to live up to her father’s expectations by continuing his quest to find the Bell books and obliterate Isabel’s testimony. She bears a son and becomes fixated on ensuring that son’s inheritance. Julia does the very things that social norms require a woman of her era to do, but none of them make her happy, and in fact they drive her to violence, cruelty, and self-destruction.

The women who escape the burdens of gendered exploitation do so through their own labor and in community with women. Daisy stays with Isabel for 50 years, Dotty forwards the letter Henry destroys, Deidre publishes under a man’s name, and Evelyn searches the archive after hours. The novel locates its hope in these small acts of defiance and solidarity, positioning them against projects like the Guild of Women Binders, which ends up placing a façade of liberation atop tedious labor. The novel does not extend any utopian possibilities as to how women can achieve empowerment, but it does suggest that it is important for them to learn from each other and one another’s stories, even as they echo across time.