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A favourite of the gods ; and, A compass error / Sybille Bedford ; preface by Daniel Mendelsohn.
Van Pelt Library PR6052.E3112 A6 2017
Available
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Bedford, Sybille, 1911-2006, author.
- Mendelsohn, Daniel Adam, 1960- author of introduction.
- Series:
- New York Review Books classics
- NYRB classics
- Standardized Title:
- Novels. Selections
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Italian American women--Fiction.
- Italian American women.
- Southern France.
- Americans--France--Fiction.
- Americans.
- France.
- Riviera (France)--Fiction.
- Riviera (France).
- Mothers and daughters--Fiction.
- Mothers and daughters.
- France, Southern--Fiction.
- France, Southern.
- Teenage girls--Fiction.
- Teenage girls.
- France--Riviera.
- Genre:
- Fiction.
- Domestic fiction.
- Historical fiction.
- Bildungsromans.
- Physical Description:
- xiv, 491 pages ; 21 cm.
- Other Title:
- Favorite of the gods
- Place of Publication:
- New York, NY : New York Review Books, [2017]
- Summary:
- "A Favourite of the Gods is the story of two generations of a single family, united by a strong matrilineal bond but divided by the customs of their differing nationalities. Anna Howland, the matriarch and American heiress, born in the 1870s to a prominent, liberal New England family marries an Italian prince and makes her home in Rome; her daughter Constanza, the favorite of the title, inherits her mother's beauty, intelligence, and wealth, along with her father's Catholicism, which she soon rejects in the course of her unconventional but first-rate education. When disaster strikes, Anna and the prince fall back on the conventional standardsof behavior of their disparate cultures; Constanza, with her European upbringing, is free to develop her own moral code, to plot her own course in life, and she does so with fantastic daring, making an unconventional life for herself in England and on the continent at the time of the first world war and its aftermath. Her own daughter Flavia, introduced in A Favourite of the Gods, is the heroine of A Compass Error, which begins where the first novel concludes. Flavia too is a brilliant young woman, though both more brash and more faltering than her mother, studying in France for her entrance exam to Oxford when she becomes involved with a mysterious woman whose arrival at a sensitive moment in Flavia's adolescence will alter both her and her mother's lives forever"-- Provided by publisher.
- "A Favourite of the Gods: A Theme explored by James and Wharton- that of the New World, naive, upright, puritanical, confronting the Old, steeped in sophisticated irony, by a European witness to two world wars. Her heroine is Constanza, a beautiful Italian pagan born to privilege, health, and intelligence. Like her mother, the straitlaced New England heiress Anna Howland, she thinks she is happy, until, in her maturity, she realizes what she lacks- a purpose, and a part"-- Provided by publisher.
- Contents:
- A Favourite of the Gods
- Introduction 5
- Prologue 13
- Part 1 A Rational Education & The Story of a Marriage 23
- Part 2 In Another Country 105
- Part 3 Voyageur sur la Terre 203
- A Compass Error
- Introduction 285
- Prologues 293
- 1 A Day 301
- 2 A Week 315
- 3 A Night 333
- 4 Some Weeks 382
- 5 Friday Saturday Sunday 399
- 6 Monday Tuesday Wednesday 417
- 7 Thursday 442
- 8 Cornered 456.
- Contains:
- Bedford, Sybille, 1911-2006. Compass error.
- Compass error.
- Other Format:
- Online version: Bedford, Sybille, 1911-2006. Favourite of the gods ;
- ISBN:
- 9781681370569
- 1681370565
- OCLC:
- 963230720
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