The Crimson Petal and the White

Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White, published in 2002, is set in Victorian London, and its title comes from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's 1847 poem "Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal". Sugar is a young woman working in a brothel who has her own plan for getting out of it. William Rackham is the unwilling heir to a perfume business, a man of limited self-awareness, who decides that he wants her and installs her in his house. From there she is drawn into the running of the business and into the household, including the unhappiness of his wife, Agnes, who has been kept entirely in the dark about sexual matters and whose diary records her confusion about her own body and her marriage.

The novel moves between all of its main characters rather than settling with one, and the narration is omniscient, occasionally turning to address the reader directly. Several of the characters write: Sugar is at work on a novel, and the household also produces the sermons of William's brother Henry and the diary that Agnes keeps, so the book's accounts of its own events are layered among the documents its people produce.

Faber wrote the first draft of the novel in 1980 on a typewriter and set the manuscript aside, returning to it and revising it more than twenty years later before it was published.