Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child abuse, child sexual abuse, animal death, and death.

“There had been a sensation of too much space around me there, at the place where my father, then later my mother, were sent into their adjacent shafts of opened earth. (It seemed callous to me back then, to lower a person into a hole in the ground using ropes and cords instead of arms.)”

The protagonist feels a lot of emotion standing at her parents’ graves and reflecting on their burial. She does not like how they were lowered into the ground, finding it impersonal to treat a person, even if dead, as though they are just an object. This recollection mirrors the scene at the end of the novel when she helps bury Sister Jenny. In that final scene, the protagonist participates by lowering the coffin to people in the grave, handing her off. This starkly different image is symbolic of her transformation in a place more suited for her.

“During Lauds I found I was thinking, But how do they get anything done? All these interruptions day in, day out, having to drop what you’re doing and toddle into church every couple of hours. Then I realised: it’s not an interruption to the work; it is the work. This is the doing.”

Throughout the novel, the protagonist undergoes a transformation in which she becomes more accustomed to and comfortable with life at the abbey. This scene is one of the earliest in which that transformation in her character takes place. She begins to see life at the abbey not as filled with distraction but full of purpose. She finds purpose in the work there, abandoning the distractions from her previous life.

“I find it hard to stop tears pricking my eyes, which alarms me. It is to do with being greeted warmly by a stranger, offered peace for no reason, without question. They have kind faces; warmth radiates from them.”

When the protagonist first arrives at the abbey, she is at the end of her marriage and bogged down by the misery in the world around her.