A World of Love

Zusatztext "In the first rank of the brilliant women writers."-- The New York Times "In A World of Love Miss Bowen's powers are at their summit…perception! wit! and beauty flash from every page."-- The New York Times Book Review "One of the handful of great English novelists of [her] century."-- The Washington Post "Bowen writes beautifully--sometimes! in fact! so beautifully it hurts."— Time Informationen zum Autor Elizabeth Bowen Klappentext In a writing career that spanned the 1920s to the 1960s, Anglo-Irish author Elizabeth Bowen created a rich and nuanced body of work in which she enlarged the comedy of manners with her own stunning brand of emotional and psychological depth. In A World of Love , an uneasy group of relations are living under one roof at Montefort, a decaying manor in the Irish countryside. When twenty-year-old Jane finds in the attic a packet of love letters written years ago by Guy, her mother's one-time fiance who died in World War I, the discovery has explosive repercussions. It is not clear to whom the letters are addressed, and their appearance begins to lay bare the strange and unspoken connections between the adults now living in the house. Soon, a girl on the brink of womanhood, a mother haunted by love lost, and a ruined matchmaker with her own claim on the dead wage a battle that makes the ghostly Guy as real a presence in Montefort as any of the living.I The sun rose on a landscape still pale with the heat of the day before. There was no haze, but a sort of coppery burnish out of the air lit on flowing fields, rocks, the face of the one house and the cliff of limestone overhanging the river. The river gorge cut deep through the uplands. This light at this hour, so unfamiliar, brought into being a new world -- painted, expectant, empty, intense. The month was June, of a summer almost unknown; for this was a country accustomed to late wakenings, to daybreaks humid and overcast. At all times open and great with distance, the land this morning seemed to enlarge again, throwing the mountains back almost out of view in the south of Ireland's amazement at being cloudless. Out in front of the house, on a rise of rough grass, somewhat surprisingly stood an obelisk; which, now outlined by the risen sun, cast towards Montefort its long shadow -- only this connected the lordly monument with the dwelling. For the small mansion had an air of having gone down: for one thing, trees had been felled around it, leaving space impoverished and the long low roofline framed by too much sky. The door no longer knew hospitality; moss obliterated the sweep for the turning carriage; the avenue lived on as a rutted track, and a poor fence, close up to the house, served to keep back wandering grazing cattle. Had the facade not carried a ghost of style, Montefort would have looked, as it almost did, like nothing more than the annexe of its farm buildings -- whose slipshod gables and leaning sheds, flaking whitewash and sagging rusty doors made a patchwork for some way out behind. A stone archway, leading through to the stables and nobly canopied by a chestnut tree, sprang from the side of the house and was still imposing. Montefort stood at a right-angle to the nearby gorge, towards which it presented a blind end -- though in this the vestige of a sealed-up Venetian window was to the traced. In its day the window had overlooked the garden which, broken-walled, still projected over the river view. A way zigzagged steeply down through thickets and undergrowth to the water's edge: the cliff arose from the water, opposite. The half-asleep face of Montefort was at this hour drowned in early light. A girl came out of the house, and let herself through the gate in the fence. Wearing a trailing Edwardian muslin dress, she stepped out slowly towards the obelisk, shading her eye...

Product details

• Authors: Elizabeth Bowen, Nancy Bowen
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 12.08.2003
• EAN: 9781400031054
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-3105-4
• No. of pages: 160
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 203 mm x 9 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature