The Glass Castle

The Glass Castle is a 1973 Mills & Boon romance by Violet Winspear, published as a 188-page paperback and recorded simply as romantic fiction. The book sets a marriage at the start and then examines why two people who have agreed to it have done so, which is the structure Winspear used repeatedly for the line.

Edwin Trequair's stated philosophy is quoted on the first page: in the East, they say a woman's mind is a jungle and the one jungle in which a man should never become lost. He marries anyway, and the novel makes the question of his motive explicit, asking why he proposed and why Heron accepted. Her answer is bound up with the house, the Glass Castle, which has been the fixed point of her life and which he owns.

The complication is that she is not a woman who would marry for mercenary reasons, so the novel has to explain an agreement she makes for a reason she does not entirely accept herself. Her feeling for her husband is described as fear and curiosity rather than love, and the book works out whether such a marriage can be made to function. It is a short, tense romance of the kind Mills & Boon published in quantity in the early 1970s.