The Whirlpool

by Jane Urquhart

Published 18 October 1986
It is the summer of 1889 and on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, the undertaker's wife is busy, for this is the season of crazy stunts and frequent accidents. Across the street, in Kirk's Hotel, lives David McDougal, an obsessive military historian haunted by his past and by a wife whose own dreams move to the sonorous rhythms of Browning's poetry and take shape in the woods beside a whirlpool. And it is here, in a glade below the falls, that she first encounters the poet, Patrick, the man destined to change her life.