Just now, on BBC?Radio 4, a woman was describing her eight years in the toils of a stalker whom she still can’t escape; who deluges her every day with emails demanding why she won’t accept that she actually loves him.

The Doll Factory
Elizabeth Macneal
(Picador, 336 PP, £12.99)
Tablet bookshop price £11.69 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Just now, on BBC?Radio 4, a woman was describing her eight years in the toils of a stalker whom she still can’t escape; who deluges her every day with emails demanding why she won’t accept that she actually loves him. It’s a poisonous situation, infecting a whole life, causing endless expense and continual subterfuge; and perhaps we tend to think it a specifically contemporary evil, facilitated by the possibilities of the internet, tracking, communicating with and keeping tabs on the victim.

But did it happen in the past? It happens in The Doll Factory with shocking and violent immediacy. Just as in the twenty-first century, a Victorian stalker moulds an image of his target in his own mind as someone complicit in his feelings, partaking in them, even, and wanting to be rescued from her life.

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