She was kept prisoner in the family house in London. I wanted to give the impression of two lives touching each other across the years, and how this unspoken connection with Beatrix Potter eventually leads Helen to overcoming her psychological restraints. From the title onward, rats play a major role in the story. Helen is the bad rat of the story. At one point her father, after she scratches his face, calls her a vicious little rat.
Many abused children think of themselves as bad, that they did a bad thing.
A lot of the stuff that is said in the story is either quotes from people who have been abused or paraphrases of things they've said. In the story, Helen goes through the different stages that, according to psychotherapists, are necessary in order to overcome some of the after-effects of child sexual abuse. Realistically it takes years to get over the mental anguish of abuse. Her perception of herself is bad. Another correlation is that rats are born survivors, and survivors is a term used to describe child-abuse survivors.