This novel did a pretty good job pretending to be a Victorian novel, if the Victorians actually wrote about all the things they refused to write about. Waters has a nice feel for era and even though the style still feels more 21st century than 19th, that's not a bad thing.
The plot itself was delightful and intricate enough to be a Dickens novel. I'm not sure where it falls when it comes to my own personal standards of improbable gratuitousness (the sex itself was well done and...touching, let's say, but there were other moments when I couldn't tell if elements felt out of place or not).
I'm not sure why I only liked this book 3 stars worth, but while I enjoyed it and finished it fairly quickly, it took a very long time for it to become compelling. I think my biggest problem was that everyone with any power was completely horrible and it was depressing in a way that made me just want to walk away from the book and the world it created. I'm not bothered by people doing terrible things because they thought they were right (which happens throughout history) but so many people in this book just felt psychopathic in their inability to see pain in others and it was unpleasant.
Which is not to say that I won't read other works by Waters, she's a talented writer and, when I'm not feeling repelled by the characters, she tells a sweet love story. But I'm hoping that the malaise of evilness is confined to this book alone.