The Counterplot

Teresa Lane watches the changing interrelations of her family and, beset by the complexity of everyday life, transposes those impressions into an imaginative play set in a fourteenth-century Spanish convent. The play operates as a private dramatization of inner conflicts, giving form to subconscious desires and repressed irritations that she cannot otherwise express. The narrative moves between close domestic observation and the dense, symbolic scenes she invents, exploring the literary temperament and the processes by which perception is converted into art, while the prose balances rich landscape detail with subtle psychological portrayal.