Outlander Book Club: Book 2, Chapter 18 breakdown

Foreshadowing within the Outlander chapter

There is a little bit of foreshadowing within the chapter. The men who attack Claire are members of the nobility. It’s clear they have money and this is just for sport.

It seems like it should be Comte St. Germain who has sent them out to attack Claire and Mary. There’s a problem with this assumption. The men saw Claire’s face and ran because she is “La Dame Blanche.” If the Comte had sent them, they would have known exactly who they were.

They were with someone else of high rank. Claire sees a beauty mark on the hand of one, which will come up at a later point.

The Duke of Sandringham is involved. We know that now. He seems to be uninterested in the talk of attackers as if he knows all about them. It’s only a mention of Charles finding money that piques his interest.

Adapting the Dragonfly in Amber chapter

This chapter was certainly used for the Outlander series, but not quite in the same way. Instead of an explosion making Claire late for the dinner party, it’s a broken carriage wheel. The women and Murtagh walk home, with Fergus running ahead to let Jamie know what has happened.

Why would the show change this? There will have likely been a few reasons. The main one would be the cost. The cost of doing an explosion that leads to nothing major for the overall plot would have been too much. To keep the budget down, finding another reason for Claire to be late home made more sense.

In the end, the outcome was still the same. Mary was still raped, Alex Randall got to the house and looked after her, and Mary still woke and alerted the rest of the guests to the situation.

The dinner party was also very different. This was a plan to get some secrets out in the open, mainly that Charles and Louise were having an affair. Claire and Jamie wanted to throw Charles’s plan off and making him realize Louise was pregnant with his child was the best way to do that.

It put more emphasis on the dinner party to give it an important reason to happen in the episode. Otherwise, the dinner party was just a small bit with the main focus being on the rape and then the misunderstanding afterward. This worked out for timing, especially bringing smaller elements from the books together in one episode.

What did you get when reading Outlander Book 2, Chapter 18? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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