Black Month

Black Month is a Breton period of winter darkness linked to the dead and to the season of communal storytelling. It gives shape to two related practices in the novel: Gode’s oral tales, made compelling by the gathering of listeners in a darkened room, and séances, whose participants disagree over whether darkness permits contact with spirits or facilitates deception.

Seasonal and Cultural Setting

In a discussion of a story about fear of women and the rule of passion, intuition, and imagination, a character places its imagery in a much older religious landscape: local female divinities, displaced by Christianity, remain faintly acknowledged in shrines. The passage names Dahud and Vivien as figures whose meanings have shifted, and associates Vivien with streams and fountains. Black Month thus belongs to a seasonal world in which older beliefs persist within later religious culture, though the novel presents that inheritance through conversation rather than a settled explanation.

The season also provides a specific temporal frame for encounters with the dead. In an account of spiritualist practice, Mrs Hella Lees argues that manifestations occur in darkness and asks whether ghosts appear at twilight and whether Celtic peoples meet the dead’s messengers during Black Month. Her claim sets seasonal custom beside experimental language about light, without resolving whether the phenomena are supernatural or manufactured.

Storytelling by Firelight

Sabine describes how Gode’s stories depend on the contrast between the outdoor dark and the closeness of listeners indoors. The great hall, bleak in daylight, becomes a place of intimacy during Black Month. The company gathers around a fire; they work at knitting, snipping, and plaiting, and Gode may bring cake or roasted chestnuts. Storytelling is not simply the delivery of a plot: Gode’s gestures and the moving shadows help shape the experience, while the listeners’ own faces and the room’s furnishings are transformed by the firelight in their perception.

This scene makes oral storytelling a shared, embodied event. The fire, the gathered company, and Gode’s movements combine to hold attention, while the journal gives Sabine a different means of working through experience: she writes privately to discover what she saw and turn pain into curiosity. The contrast between spoken tale and private writing is part of the season’s significance; one creates a communal world in the room, while the other gives the narrator a tool for inquiry.

Belief, Skepticism, and the Séance

Black Month also frames a recurring dispute over spiritualism. At a breakfast party attended by Randolph Henry Ash, Christabel LaMotte, and Blanche Glover, Glover expresses belief that spiritual manifestations can occur. Ash says that he would require convincing experimental proof. He argues, however, that historical imagination demands a kind of poetic belief in the mental world of the people being studied—an imaginative openness that can unsettle the historian’s own convictions. LaMotte declines to give a direct opinion when asked about spirits.

In a letter, LaMotte recounts a séance that she believes offers comfort to the bereaved: a mother reports holding her dead infant, and the father touching the child’s curls. Her account emphasizes the consoling force of the experience, in marked contrast with Ash’s suspicion that séances rely on fraud and collective agitation. The disagreement is not merely about evidence; it concerns what grieving people need and whether imaginative or spiritual belief can be trusted.

Ash’s confrontation with Lees gives that disagreement a public, physical consequence. He describes a dark séance at Olivia Judge’s house, where he suspects concealed devices and catches the medium’s hand while reaching for an apparent manifestation. In Lees’s account of another sitting, Ash arrives despite the group’s expectation that his presence may disrupt the circle. A voice, noises, and an apparent wreath are reported; when Ash calls for lights and reaches toward the medium, the séance breaks down. The competing accounts leave the meaning unsettled: Black Month marks a setting where darkness can sustain ritual and belief, but also where suspicion, performance, and the desire for consolation make certainty difficult.