"I'd describe Edie as someone who's very lonely, lost in a world that's trying to re-shape itself.
"She's someone who has this determination a lot of people would have had after the war, that something like that must never happen again.
"Because the cost had been so great, people must strive to make a better society, a better world to live in.
"But at the end what you discover is that despite her desire to be someone different and to be part of a world that is different, she actually holds the most repugnant and unexpected views on certain sectors of society and that's quite shocking.
"It's as if, despite the fact that she wants the world to be forged anew, she's not connected with humanity. She's very alone and embittered.
"I think there were large groups of men and women who found the whole business of having been married in the war and the war interrupting their marriage and interrupting their parenting, they found it extremely difficult just to pick up where they left off.
"I think there were probably relationships that were damaged beyond repair because of the war and you actually had a lot of people staying together because they felt that they had to, rather than because they actually wanted to.
"I think a lot of women, because of being on their own, having to bring up children on their own, having to go out to work, having to start really thinking about being independent, it meant that they started to think in a completely different way about themselves - about the world in which they lived.
"When the men came back from the war, they just expected them to slot back into this rather deferential post that they'd had prior to the war, but the women resented it and didn't want to do it any more.
"I think maybe they wondered why they'd fallen in love with that person in the first place.
"Likewise for the men who were returning from the war, they'd seen such violence and brutality that often they didn't have the language to share. So they locked off from their partners. You got two people in a relationship who were not communicating on a fundamental level at all.
Edie's story is incredibly sad. I do think she's very isolated. She's in a family situation, she's got these two children and a husband but actually she's not where she wants to be, she's not with who she wants to be.
"I think that that can make you more lonely than being on your own."
