As we talked about in chat but I am saying again for the benefit of the DW archive, I do think that Lindop is extremely interested in inherently unsatisfied/unsatisfiable romantic obsessions and really deeply uninterested in, uh, resolutions -- or possibly she just doesn't know how to resolve it. Presnor definitely seems a parallel to all her weird adolescent girls with uncomfortable fixations on kind, safe and unattainable adult men, and none of them (that I've read) ever end the book by getting over their obsessions; this is just the world state and nobody is happy about it!