The Pretty Lady
Book Description
This book is annotated with a detailed and extensive biography and bibliography of Mr. Bennett, written by Frederick Taber Cooper.
"Annotated Author's Edition" comprises the best fiction ever written in history, every single work annotated with biographical sketches, reviews and much more. This series offers a large range of out-of-print books and long-lost titles, as well as million seller...
MoreThis book is annotated with a detailed and extensive biography and bibliography of Mr. Bennett, written by Frederick Taber Cooper.
"Annotated Author's Edition" comprises the best fiction ever written in history, every single work annotated with biographical sketches, reviews and much more. This series offers a large range of out-of-print books and long-lost titles, as well as million sellers that form the essentials of literature. By buying a book from this series you can count on top quality. All books have been digitally revised and optimized for Kindle, including an interactive table-of-contents for easy browsing. We do not sell cheap scanned stuff, all our books must meet our own high standards of reading. If you like to find more books from this series, please use the Amazon search field within the Kindle store and type "Annotated Author's Edition". This will show you the whole range, which grows constantly and almost day-by-day.
The book: The story moves around the persistent figure of Christine, "the pretty lady," who has learned her profession from her Parisian mother with almost religious conscientiousness. Her painful life in Ostend with a rich American, and her mad refugee flight to England, have not dislodged the calm direction of her soul. Mr. Bennett dilates almost lovingly on the taste of her London flat, her kimonos, her musical sensitiveness. As the war goes on, throwing London into a moral chaos, filling the young women of position and official virtue-such as Lady Queenie-with a wild dark force of destruction, Christine, soft-fleshed and single-minded, lives straight on below the battle, wrapped in her eternal role, concerned only with her flat, her men, her slowly augmenting municipal bonds. Mr. Bennett's ironic point seems to be that in a war-shattered world this patient sobriety of sensuality is a good, is perhaps the one permanence, the one eternal value left. Against this demi-mondaine, the people of the acceptable world loom sinister and detestable: Lady Queenie, vibrant and perverse, dancing (in one of Mr. Bennett's most brilliant chapters) to the whir of Zeppelins on a London roof, only so to be casually slain; G. J. Hoape, the middle-aged bachelor, who plays his Bach fugue before breakfast in his exquisite rooms and goes out dutifully to serve on war committees ; the beautiful Concepci�n, who loses her newly married husband and who flunks her welfare work in the munition factory. It is Christine's lover that Mr. Hoape becomes-her major but, to his annoyance, not exclusive lover-while Lady Queenie and Concepci�n restlessly try to throw silken chains around him.
These people drag through the book the current activities of the smart and important people of their class-the myriad interests of "war work"-busy, fuming. Yet through this dreary trail is the note of hopeless futility. Mr. Bennett makes them no less blighted in their serious effort than in their play. That bright, smart London society of before the war, so culturally and sexually aware, so feverishly straining to live, is shown not at all redeemed by the new devotion to good works, but only all the more surely fraying away into a sort of neurotic ennui. The one really moving episode is Christine's adventure with the drunken soldier. As a military figure he is curiously shadowy. But his particulate need, his forlornness, which is met so unhesitatingly by Christine's motherly concern, is intensely human. She packs him off from her very bed to the front in order to save him from disgrace. In her warmth, and in his deep superstition which bestows on her his grateful gift of an amulet, we are back again at rich, old, healing human values.
Publisher | Jazzybee Publishing |
Binding | Kindle Edition (55 editions) |
Reading Level | Uncategorized
|
# of Pages | N/A |
ISBN-10 | B004TB0GIM |
Publication Date | 02/22/2011 |
You must be a member of JacketFlap to add a video to this page. Please
Log In or
Register.
View Arnold Bennett's profile