Desire: 3

Product Description

Desire Quebell is the illegitimate daughter & only child of a wealthy financier He brings her up in luxury & she enjoys the pleasures of society yet she is not a conventional Edwardian daughter She rebels intellectually & chooses not to marry a successful man where there is no love or honour She admires the work of provincial novelist Peter Grimstone & uses him to engineer the break-up of her engagement But her father has neglected to make provision for Desire in his will so when he dies unexpectedly she has to leave her home without a penny of her own She moves to a boarding house & studies secretarial work intending to find a job before the last of her jewel money runs out But her class bars her from employment & she can't make new friends with being misunderstood Just as she faces destitution Peter tracks her down with the offer of a job his father has had a stroke & Peter needs help to run the family pottery business Will Desire consider leaving London to be a book-keeper in a small Staffordshire town away from everyone she has ever known? But her new life at Grimstone's is not a haven Peter's father is an angry bitter man his mother is nervous & unhappy & his brother Alexander is an unscrupulous plotter who wants Peter out of the way Desire must face sexual aggression as well as social suspicion before she & Peter find the way to happiness in work & life Cornelia Wachter's critical introduction shows how Silberrad's novel challenged the gender stereotypes of the day & set out different ideals for masculinity that conflicted with contemporary expectations of how men should behave Marriage as an institution is also held up for examination how should a modern marriage work? & what is wrong with the older model? Desire's reconnection with nature as she walks the moors & hills connects to the wider point in the novel that women & men need to reconnect with their primitive instincts' as a correction to the mechanised urban alienation that Desire has escaped