Unsympathetic jerks are cruel to each other and then die of mysterious ailments. I don't know how to read this book. It's sometimes advertised as romance, which just sounds like something people made up because it was written by women and people get married in it. There's a lot of cousins marrying each other. There's a lot of people up and dying for no clear reason. There are issues of female non-inheritance. There's some serious classism, which is really what it all hinges on.

You get a lot of incidental information about Victorian life. For example they had dinner at noon. They were not surprised by people dying all the time. They thought of servants as non-entities and did and said all sorts of intimate things in their presence. They had mixed feelings about the reality of ghosts.

I really hated this book in the beginning and now that I've finished it, I might still hate it. I hated the characters and the weird plot and all the goddamn whining. And yet I finished it and now I'm thinking about it. So there is something compelling there. By the way I think it was all tuberculosis, that mysterious ailment everyone had.