The Last Romantics

Set in the old world of England and the new world of America, this novel tells the story of four privileged young women--Alice, Louisa, Penny, and Daphne--from their meeting at Oxford in the early 1960s to their lives ten years later

Four Englishwomen whose lives first intertwine at Oxford University are the focus of this splendid first novel. Coming of age in the early 1960s, and sure that their next step, after school, will be marriage, Penny, Alice, Daphne and Louisa devote more time to finding suitable husbands than they do to scholarship. The story moves forward with a quartet of weddings, followed by births, betrayals and divorce. More than anything else, it is Louisa's husband Edmund who provides the connections among these very different women. At Oxford, he is their perfect Englishman, handsome, sporting and erudite. Later he symbolizes traditional values in a world that lacks dignity and style. At the end of a decade, he is a remnant of a way of life the women have come to regard as falsely romantic. Seebohm, author of The Man Who Was Vogue, a biography of Conde Nast, has chosen a compelling and accessible narrative structure in which each woman speaks in her turn. The prose is elegant, and images are vivid and sometimes hilarious. Readers will find pleasure on every page of this book.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

For Alice, Penny, Daphne, and Louisa, an Oxford education in the early 1960s was a stepping stone to marriage. During two decades their friendships change as their lives fill with children, careers, husbands, and lovers. Although told mainly by Alice, the story is enriched by the other three viewpoints, which sometimes differ in interpreting events. In the 1970s the friends emigrate to the United States, where they are affected by the Women's Liberation Movement. In this first novel Seebohm treats her characters with affection and amusement. Her humor is fresh; her witty comments about life on this side of the Atlantic in the 1970s are particularly funny. She holds a mirror to our reecent past and lets readers recognize women they might have known or been.Kathy Piehl, Mankato State Univ. Minn.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.