The Sister

Acknowledgments

Many thanks for the hard work and insightful editing of Lennie Goodings at Virago / Little, Brown in the United Kingdom and Carole Baron at Knopf in the United States, and for the sound advice of Judith Murray at Greene & Heaton. Thank you also to Hazel Orme; to the entire team at Little, Brown; and to the staff at Knopf.

Thank you to my husband, William, for his fine judgment and unerring support; to my early readers Olivia Warham and Lizzie King for their comments and encouragement. Thank you to my other readers: Charlotte Bennett, Cat Armstrong, Victoria Mitford, Julia Pincus, Beck Armstrong and, in particular, Anne-Marie Mackay for her help and advice, and Jim Ind, who put up with my many questions. I’m forever grateful to Bella Murray for introducing my work to Stevie Lee, and to Stevie for introducing it to Judith Murray. Thank you to Sam Morgan for keeping the children from going wild.

Thank you to Les Hill at Butterfly Conservation in Dorset for his expertise and time spent checking my facts, and to the Royal Entomological Society in London for allowing me to use their library. The books I found most useful were Moths by E. B. Ford; Collecting & Breeding Butterflies & Moths by Brian Worthington-Stuart; and, in particular, I drew on and borrowed from P. B. M. Allen’s wonderful anecdotal accounts of moth collecting in the early to mid-twentieth century, A Moth Hunter’s Gossip; Moths and Memories; etc.

The scientific ideas and experiments that I have attributed to my fictional characters in this novel are borrowed from or based on true debates and experimentation during the period. I’m very grateful to countless entomologists of the mid-twentieth century whose ideas have influenced the perspective, or piqued the scientific curiosity, of my characters.