Kohler left South Africa at the age of seventeen, but her rejected home continues to loom large. Like Rebecca and Manderley, the place seeps into her numerous novels through spectres and fantasies. The subject of domestic violence – Maxine was killed by her husband – is addressed in the wider context of colonial violence. There is a chilling disclosure that black servants were sometimes instructed to hold down the female victim by the white master, a double humiliation on their part. Unresolved questions abound, many inflected with guilt.

Travel is on a grand scale; the writer comes from a moneyed and eccentric family. France and Italy provide counterpoints, but don’t prevent Kohler from feeling out of place. Her first husband’s friends, male Yale literature students, are befuddled when she wishes to discuss Plato’s Symposium. It is the early 1960s; she is a twenty-year-old mother and should be concerned with domestic matters. After Maxine’s death, in the United States again but now separated from her philandering husband, Kohler discovers in writing a previously unexperienced agency.

‘A subterranean stream of story runs parallel with reality through all my life.’ Outside of dramatic familial narratives, literature was a source of pleasure and rich intellectual engagement for both sisters. With its bell-like prose, both clear and graceful, Once We Were Sisters achieves poetic salvation for two lost women.