Flora was published by Bloomsbury in 2013, when Godwin was seventy-six, and it is perhaps her finest novel — certainly her most concentrated and devastating. The story is simple: ten-year-old Helen is left for the summer with her twenty-two-year-old cousin Flora while Helen’s father does mysterious war work at Oak Ridge. Flora is trusting, innocent, and emotionally vulnerable; Helen is intelligent, manipulative, and emotionally guarded. The summer unfolds against the backdrop of the polio epidemic of 1945, and the threat of contagion — physical and emotional — pervades every scene.
The novel is narrated by the adult Helen looking back on that summer, and the dual perspective creates an unbearable tension: we know something terrible is going to happen (Helen tells us so from the first page), but we cannot prevent it. The adult narrator’s guilt and self-knowledge — she understands now what she did then, though she did not understand it at the time — gives the novel its particular quality of retrospective horror.
Godwin’s late style is stripped to essentials: short chapters, precise prose, no wasted motion. The claustrophobic setting (a single house, a single summer, two people confined together by quarantine) concentrates the emotional pressure until the inevitable catastrophe feels both completely surprising and completely inevitable. The novel is a masterclass in how to build narrative tension through character rather than incident, and in how to write about guilt without either excusing or melodramatizing it.
Collecting Flora
First edition (Bloomsbury, New York, 2013): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- Signed copies: $30–$75