SOURCE: A review of The Whirlpool, in World Literature Today, Vol. 65, No. 3, Summer, 1991, p. 487.

In the following review, Elgaard discusses characterization in The Whirlpool.

Set in the (Canadian) Niagara of the 1880s, Jane Urquhart's first novel portrays characters who seek life rather than live it. Patrick, the poet, observes landscape—and the woman "mysteriously" inhabiting it—as perfect, ethereal architecture, not to be sullied by the mundane (i. e., flesh-and-blood vulnerability). Fleda, the dreamer, reads and breathes Browning's poetics, soon Patrick's as well, with a tenderness—for his reality—that he cannot countenance: "Patrick began to shake. He felt his privacy, his self, had been completely invaded—How dare she? he thought as if she, not he, had been the voyeur—She was not supposed to be aware of the lens he had fixed on her." David, Fleda's husband and a history researcher, is obsessed by the ghost...