SOURCE: A review of The Whirlpool, in Books in Canada, Vol. 16, No. 1, January-February, 1987, p. 26.

In the following, Posesorki provides a mixed assessment of The Whirlpool.

The person and poetics of Robert Browning cast a giant shadow over Jane Urquhart's ambitious first novel The Whirlpool. In her prologue Urquhart presents the elderly Browning in Venice, overwhelmed by his recollections of the poet Shelley and by portents of his death. This romantically morbid vignette introduces the major leitmotivs of her novel: dreams, obsessions, death, and their relationship to the production of art.

Browning wrote, "Throughout life, 'tis death makes life live. Gives it whatever the significance." That is the premise Urquhart dramatizes through the lives of her characters, who all are cocooned in the mourning of their death-related obsessions and livelihoods. Maud Grady, the undertaker's widow, spends her days tenderly tending the dead, and her nights dreaming of her late...