From Publishers Weekly
Well-fed gentlemen of the 1880s had their pieties and cravings, their terrible doubts. Acclaimed British novelist Wilson (The Healing Art, Wise Virgin) anatomizes the age with sprightliness, affection and penetrating satire, while peeling the wraps off Victorian marriage. Smug, dog-faced geology professor Nettleshiphis field is volcanosrapes his wife Charlotte on discovering her shamelessly volcanic desire for blond painter Timothy Lupton, who really adores their giggling, consumptive daughter Maudie. Their son Lionel falls under the spell of monkish Father Cuthbert. Decaying dandies recall bygone flirtations and, over whist and madeira, smirk at the new earnestness. Individual passions, with all their guilts and sweats, are seen in terms of questions that cracked the Victorian edifice: Darwinism, the crisis of faith, art caught between the habit of daubing classical nymphs and the lure of the Impressionists' dissolving Light. Wilson shows how fiction shapes mentality: "We're living in the stories of our own composing," whether medieval gothics or penny shockers. Skillful in its probes of a changing society, Gentlemen in England treats us to a rich and sparkling read. U.K. rights: Hamish Hamilton; translation rights: Literistic. February
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
The Nettleship family, ensconced in middle-class Victorian manners and ritual, is nonetheless living in emotional turmoil: Professor Nettleship, a geologist, has lost his faith in God and his rapport with his wife: Charlotte has not spoken to her husband for 15 years. Their son Lionel wants to become a priest, and young Maudie, frail and sensitive, tries unsucessfully to understand the adult world. A Bohemian artist and a worldly, well-born family friend help bring tensions to the surface. A curiously leaden tone pervades this novel; it may be the attempt at arch humor, but it has a sopoforic affect. And as psychological novels about centuries other than our own often do, this one slips occasionally into an anachronistic and smug tone that doesn't quite work. All the same, avid Wilson fans and Anglophiles will probably be entertained by the atmosphere and the plot's ins and outs. Laurie Spector Sullivan, Regis Coll. Archives, Weston, Mass.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
