Review
Edmund and Anne Cornhill have a happy marriage and a charming house. But three becomes a crowd when beautiful, rich, amoral Arabella comes to stay one long summer and a web of love entangles them all. But it will be Arabella who loses in the end. Howard is devastatingly observant, conveying misery, loneliness and love alike with a few strokes of detail. Her minor characters are as memorable as her protagonists, all expressing unfathomable emotions with the minutiae of their lives. (Kirkus UK)
During the course of this book Anne Cornhill, one of the three characters, is seen reading Elizabeth Taylor who also writes fastidious interpersonal novels such as this. Admittedly with more substance, and with less gracious living which here is difficult to undercut. Every occasion, even a bout of glandular fever, seems to call for champagne. But the situation is ordinary enough - a menage a trois which develops with the unexpected arrival of Arabella into a menage a deux - the until then exclusive and harmonious household of Anne and Edmund Cornhill. At first there's Arabella and Edmund, and then there's Arabella and Anne, and if sympathy is to be summoned up it's for Arabella, an overprivileged reject and the victim of a haphazard past - "just a kind of limpet; sticking to whatever seems to be suitable scenery." The scenery is attractive but in the end it seems to substitute for stronger passions in much the same way the novel does which really offers very little more than an elegant eye trip. It's by no means as appealing as her last, Something in Disguise (1970). (Kirkus Reviews)
Product Description
Anne and Edmund Cornhill have a happy marriage, a lovely home and are content, until Arabella comes to stay one summer. She is rich, rootless and amoral, and as the web of desire and love entangles all three, they realise someone will lose out. From the author of THE LONG VIEW and AFTER JULIUS. Originally published in 1972.
