The Maidens

Zoe is the orphaned daughter of Mariana’s sister, who died in a car accident when her daughter was a child. Throughout their marriage, Sebastian and Mariana kept a room in their house for Zoe to stay in during her breaks from school; Zoe was a teenager at the time, and Mariana believed her husband viewed her as a daughter. In the narrative present, Mariana commends Zoe for having overcome her childhood trauma (which she does not delve into in detail) and earned a place reading literature at Cambridge.

The narrative repeatedly hints that Zoe may not be as Mariana portrays her. Zoe knows things about Sebastian’s feelings that Mariana does not. Elsie describes her as rude. Edward and the Maidens claim that she was in their group. Mariana is unaware even that Zoe was a student of Edward until Clarissa reveals it. Zoe withholds information and provides conflicting accounts of Edward: She claims that Tara feared and was sleeping with him, that she herself is entranced by him, and that she and Mariana have a duty to investigate him, but she also chides Mariana for fixating on him.

At the end of the book, Mariana learns that Sebastian and Zoe began an affair when the latter was 15 (just below the age of consent in England), and that they planned all the murders together. His untimely death on Naxos spoiled the plan, but Zoe executed it in his honor. Zoe is taken away in an ambulance rather than a police van and later declared unfit to stand trial, which suggests that Zoe had not overcome her problems as Mariana assumed. In an ironic twist, Zoe’s name means “life” in Greek.

Mariana’s husband Sebastian is already dead when the novel begins, but readers learn his life story through his interspersed first-person narrative. In the first one, he announces that he is a killer, which may lead readers to assume that the letter writer is the killer of the Maidens. Only much later does it emerge that the person he killed was Mariana’s father, not the women (though he had a hand in plotting their deaths). Sebastian’s cruelty and violence appear to stem from the severe abuse he experienced as a child, making him one of several characters locked in a cycle of trauma and abuse. 

Intelligent, charming, and charismatic, Edward is Mariana’s primary suspect for most of the novel. He is a professor of classics at Cambridge who is especially popular with the “Maidens”: a group of young women Edward singles out for special attention, initiating them into a secret society and sleeping with them. His egoism and predatory behavior ultimately prove to be red herrings, as does his history of childhood abuse; Edward is not the murderer, although he does face repercussions for pursuing affairs with his students.