This has a great ending, and I can see how it would have been a shocker back in the day. I can't help but wish that it had been a little shorter, though, or that it had justified its (admittedly modest) length with characterisation of more than just the protagonist. As it is, it feels like one very well-drawn character amidst a sea of sketches, and so it ended up sagging a little in the middle for me. It reminds me both of Ibsen's The Doll House and Flaubert's Madame Bovary in content, although it lacks the infuriating portrait of the husband in the first, and the delightfully cutting prose of the second. It's a little bit dreamier in tone than the others, and the stultifying horror of that dreaminess does work, don't get me wrong... but of the three books this is the last one I'd read again.