London Lovers: A Novel - Hardcover

Hardy, Barbara

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 072060964X ISBN 13: 9780720609646

Publisher: Peter Owen Ltd, 1996

Synopsis

London Lovers is an account of a woman's search for sensual and social liberation. The novel follows Florence Jones from South Wales in the 1930s and '40s to the literary London of the 1970s and '80s, re-creating the story through the twists and loops of memory.
A subtle and humorous first-person narrative cuts across chronology and sequence to interweave memories of Florence's marriage and love-life and her affair with the American scholar Mick Solomon, which lasts from their meeting until his death fifteen years later.

About this title

About the Author

Barbara Hardy is Professor Emeritus at Birkbeck College, University of London, and Honorary Professor at the University College of Swansea.

Reviews

While this charming book is called a novel, it reads like the memoirs of a woman who has enjoyed sexual and social freedom and has willingly paid the price that such a life can exact. The narrator, Florence Jones, shares many characteristics with the author; in fact, the London press called this barely disguised autobiography, the sequel to a previous Hardy book, the memoir Swansea Girls. Like Hardy, Florence grew up in South Wales in the 1930s and is a professor of English at the University of London, where she specializes in Victorian writers. Divorcing Charlie, her Welsh childhood sweetheart, when the marriage can't survive high-tempo life in London, Florence dallies with several other men before settling into a 14-year affair with Mick Solomon, an American professor teaching at Oxford, who is married to an invalid. On the surface, this long-term arrangement suits Florence well: she has decided she needs her own space, and Mick can be "the steady dream-lover" she desires, without threatening her with a more permanent and binding relationship. And yet, Florence admits she is prey to jealousy of the wife (whom she refers to as "horrible Ellen"), and of the marital bonds she thinks she abhors. The novel's structure is responsible for much of its easy, intimate charm. In thematic and topical chapters (how the lovers met, what they wore and ate, how they behaved in bed), Florence mingles memories of each lover into an elegiac, but not depressing portrait of her life. Charlie and Mick both die, yet Hardy's light touch and her effortless rendering of characters who naturally weave literature into their romances make her novel a bright, intelligent read.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Described as a narrative experiment, this wildly compelling novel ostensibly depicts the tender passion of an adulterous love affair, though in the end it becomes clear that it's also a highly original meditation on the tenuous links binding fact and fiction. At the heart of this work by Hardy, a noted Welsh-born scholar of Victorian fiction and author of the memoir Swansea Girl (not reviewed), is Florence Jones, a noted scholar of Victorian fiction and a Swansea girl herself. Hardy's first-person narrative, real, convincing, clearly heartfelt, continually implies not artifice but the depths of reality. Part of the authenticity is derived from the style--zig-zag tangents of memory that take us through Florence's 15-year romance with an American professor in Oxford. Mick, whose wife is deteriorating from multiple sclerosis, meets the independent, sexually adventurous Florence and falls in love. The affair the two nourish, described in touching and candid detail, has a bold sentimentality about it, more suggestive of Victorian devotion than of an illicit liaison. It ends with Mick's untimely death. Laced throughout the narrative are moments from Florence's past--pre-Mick--of Charlie, her Welsh soulmate but unreliable husband, Mel and Timmy, her in-between lovers, and family and friends who rush by in a seemingly random fashion, until the structure, sound as any scholarly work, shines through: The heading for each chapter is the starting point for a lifetime of memories in that category, offering a varied view of Florence through the ages. Added to the structural acrobatics is the thinly veiled autobiographical novel Florence is writing about her affair with Mick, completing Hardy's circle, audaciously teasing the boundaries between the fictional and the real. Above and beyond its ambitious structure, this polished novel of sex, love, and literature is poignant and engagingly romantic. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Peter Owen Ltd
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 072060964X
• ISBN 13: 9780720609646
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 207