Like The Observations, Gillespie and I is, at heart, a book about loneliness and obsessive love. If The Observations drew on Gothic romance and sensation fiction for its inspiration, Gillespie and I follows the tradition of Henry James, using the first-person narrator to explore questions of consciousness and perception....From the vantage point of the 1930s Harriet writes enviously of the freedoms of the modern woman – her right to vote, to work, to own property – but it is the freedom of self-knowledge, the deeper psychological understanding that was to be the legacy of Freud and his peers, that Harriet, as a Victorian woman, lacks most. It is her failure to recognise this that forms the heart of this absorbing novel.