Early drafts demonstrate that marriage was crucial to Shirley's vision of the novel from the start. In one version, the sister of Erica, the protagonist (later to be named Eleanor), wants to set her up with a man. "Carrie wanted me to get married, for some inscrutable reason," Erica says. "Perhaps she found the married state so excruciatingly disagreeable herself that it was the only thing bad enough she could think of to do to me." To be married, Shirley always feared, was to lose her sense of self, to disintegrate—precisely what happens to Eleanor in the grip of the house.

"You are right in thinking that [Mycroft] is under the British government. You would also be right in a sense if you said that occasionally he IS the British government."

In the courts of the Empire, there were no innocents—there were only fools and those who took advantage of fools, as the saying went. Those who had any power were forced to play the same game as the rest of the aristocracy. Whether one was a bored provincial magistrate’s wife or a fashionable count living in a glorious manse in the capital city, one used others to get ahead. Others must be made to look worse so you looked better, gossip and intrigue being the weapons of choice to carve out your niche. It was a blood sport, and all who partook enjoyed it as such or quickly got left behind. In all her years there, she had never met a player who did not deserve their fate. Smiles hid daggers and even the poorest servants connived to attach themselves to the fastest and strongest horse.

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