The House in Paris
First US edition
|
|
| Author | Elizabeth Bowen |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Published | |
| Media type | |
| Preceded by | To the North (1932) |
| Followed by | The Death of the Heart (1938) |
The House in Paris is Elizabeth Bowen's fifth novel. It is set in France and Great Britain following World War I, and its action takes place on a single February day in a house in Paris. In that house, two young children—Henrietta and Leopold—await the next legs of their respective journeys: Henrietta is passing through on her way to meet her grandmother, while Leopold is waiting to meet his mother for the first time. The first and third sections of the novel, both called "The Present," detail what happens in the house throughout the day. The middle section of the book ("The Past") is an imagined chronicle of part of the life of Leopold's mother, Karen Michaelis, revealing the background to the events that occur in Mme Fischer's home on the day.
First published in 1935, it was well received by critics past and present, and has received praise from Virginia Woolf and A. S. Byatt. The novel combines techniques of realism and modernism, and was referred to as her "most complex work." Bowen revisits themes and structures familiar from her earlier novels; the tri-partite structure and the ten-year gap between past and present, for instance, had been used earlier in Friends and Relations, but unlike that novel, The House in Paris finds an escape from a tragic past, by way of a "magical child of myths, an archetypal redeemer."
The novel opens in Paris, early in the morning, as eleven-year-old Henrietta Mountjoy, accompanied by Miss Naomi Fisher, travels via taxi to the house of Mme Fisher, an elderly and sickly lady who for years has taken in well-off girls for a season. Henrietta is travelling to Menton, in the south of France, to spend time with her grandmother, Mrs. Arbuthnot. Mme Fisher tells Henrietta that she will be spending her day with Leopold, a nine-year-old boy who is supposed to meet his mother there for the first time; Miss Fisher asks Henrietta to "be a little considerate with Leopold", and "to ask Leopold nothing". After breakfast and a nap in the salon, Henrietta awakens to find Leopold standing before her. The two young children talk about their life: Leopold explains Mme Fisher's illness and his own anticipation regarding the arrival of his mother later that day; Henrietta reveals to Leopold that her mother is dead. Even though Leopold angers Henrietta by spilling the contents of her handbag, the two children develop a rapport.
...
Wikipedia