Her Fearful Symmetry

The Inheritance

Julia and Valentina Poole are American twins who have never left their parents’ house. Their great-aunt Elspeth Noblin, whom they never met, dies and leaves them her flat — the condition being that they live there for a year and that their mother, Elspeth’s twin sister, may not visit. The flat overlooks Highgate Cemetery.

Elspeth is, it quickly becomes clear, still present. What she wants from the twins — and from Robert, her former lover who lives downstairs, consumed by grief — forms the novel’s increasingly strange plot.

London as Gothic Stage

Niffenegger spent considerable time researching Highgate Cemetery and its history (it opened in 1839, fell into neglect, was rescued by a conservation organisation in the 1970s), and the research shows: the cemetery is rendered with the kind of specific detail that makes a place feel like a character. The novel is built around the premise that certain places accumulate significance, that the dead leave something in the spaces they inhabited, and that this something is not metaphor but has actual causal properties in the world.

The ghost story is formally more inventive than most — Niffenegger is not interested in haunting as horror but in haunting as a form of unfinished business with the living.

A Doubled Story of Twins

The novel is constructed almost entirely out of doublings. Julia and Valentina are mirror twins, identical down to internal organs reversed left-to-right, and Niffenegger uses their sameness to probe the darker possibilities of so total a bond. The two girls have never lived apart, never developed separate ambitions, never tested whether their closeness is love or a kind of imprisonment. Valentina, the weaker and more inward of the pair, begins to want a life of her own, and that ordinary impulse toward separation becomes the engine of the plot’s most disturbing turn. The twins’ generation echoes the previous one: Elspeth and Edie, the mother of Julia and Valentina, were themselves twins, estranged by a secret the novel slowly exposes. The structure rhymes one pair against the other, so that the supernatural machinery never feels arbitrary — it grows directly out of the question of what twins owe each other and what they are willing to do to be free.

Love That Outlasts the Body

What gives Her Fearful Symmetry its unease is the way it treats persistence beyond death not as comfort but as menace. Robert, Elspeth’s grieving lover, cannot let her go, and Elspeth, trapped in the flat she once lived in, cannot let go of the living. The novel asks what it would actually mean for a love to refuse death — and answers that it would be possessive, manipulative, and ultimately monstrous. Niffenegger, who is a visual artist and printmaker as well as a novelist, gives the book the texture of a gothic etching: muted, meticulous, faintly morbid. Her prose is restrained where the material is lurid, which keeps the late, audacious plot developments from tipping into melodrama even when they strain plausibility. The control is deliberate, and it is what allows the novel’s final, divisive twist to land as a genuine moral shock rather than a cheap one.

Niffenegger After The Time Traveler’s Wife

Her Fearful Symmetry arrived in 2009 carrying the enormous expectations created by The Time Traveler’s Wife, Niffenegger’s 2003 debut, which sold in the millions and was adapted for film. The second novel was always going to be measured against that phenomenon, and many readers found it cooler, stranger, and less emotionally overwhelming. That is a fair description, but it undersells what the book does on its own terms. Where the debut was a romance built on a science-fiction premise, this is a true gothic — descended from Wilkie Collins and the Victorian ghost story, set among the Victorian dead of Highgate, and far more interested in dread than in tears. Readers who arrive expecting another grand love story may be disoriented; those willing to meet the book as the eerie, slightly perverse object it is will find it the more formally daring of the two. It pairs well with the contemporary literary gothic of Susan Hill’s ghost stories or Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger.

Highgate as a Living Character

The single most acclaimed achievement of the novel is its rendering of Highgate Cemetery, and it is no accident: Niffenegger volunteered as a tour guide there while researching the book, and the cemetery’s tour-guide character, Robert, is partly a portrait of that experience. Highgate, opened in 1839 as one of London’s grand Victorian “garden cemeteries,” fell into decades of overgrown neglect before a conservation trust rescued it in the 1970s, and that history of beauty, decay, and recovery suffuses the novel. Niffenegger does not use the cemetery as mere atmospheric backdrop; she makes its real graves, monuments, and ivy-choked paths into the moral landscape of the book, a place where the Victorian cult of mourning still presses on the present. Karl Marx and George Eliot lie buried there, and the weight of all those dead lives gives the twins’ small, contemporary story a context far larger than itself. The cemetery is the novel’s argument made physical: that the past is not gone, only waiting, and that the living share their city with the dead more intimately than they care to admit.

How to Approach It

Readers will get the most from Her Fearful Symmetry by setting aside the comparison to The Time Traveler’s Wife and meeting it as a deliberate, slow-burning gothic. The first half builds patiently, establishing the flat, the cemetery, the four central figures, and the texture of grief, before the supernatural plot tightens its grip. The reward for patience is a final movement of real audacity — a development that some readers find brilliant and others find a betrayal, but which no one finds dull. It is a divisive ending precisely because Niffenegger commits so fully to the logic of her premise. Approached in the right spirit, the novel is a strange, melancholy, and genuinely original entry in the modern ghost story, and one that lingers in the mind like the cold of a stone chapel.

Our rating: 3.8/5 — Niffenegger’s stranger and darker second novel: less heartbreaking than its predecessor, more formally original, entirely worth reading.

Reading Guides

• The Time Traveler’s Wife — Full Review