Falling Angels
Trade cloth edition in very good condition. Dust jacket with intact price point. Full number line starting with 1. Mylar cover included.
“I have spent my life waiting for something to happen,’ she said. ‘And I have come to understand that nothing will. Or it already has, and I blinked during that moment and it’s gone. I don’t know which is worse—to have missed it or to know there is nothing to miss.”
Set among the sweeping skirts and social upheavals of Edwardian London, Falling Angels is a meditation on change, loss, and recovery. Her central characters are two young girls of the same age, whose family plots are situated side-by-side in a cemetery modeled on Highgate. Lavinia Waterhouse is respectably middle-class, devoted, like her conventional, doting mother, to the right way to do things, although suspiciously well-schooled in subjects like funerary sculpture and the English practices of mourning. Her friend Maude Coleman comes from a slightly more privileged and free-thinking background. In contrast with Lavinia’s mother, Maude’s mother Kitty Coleman is well-educated by the standards of the day and it has made her restless and irritable. But neither her reading, nor her gardening, nor her affair with the somber, high-thinking governor of the cemetery is enough for Kitty. She comes alive only when she discovers the women’s suffrage movement, and her devotion to the cause takes her away from Maude in every sense.
The narrative spans exactly the years of Edward VII’s reign, from the morning after his mother Queen Victoria’s death in January 1901 to his own death in May 1910. Chevalier deftly uses the nation’s dramatically different mourning for these two monarchs to signal the social transformations of the period. Readers at ease with English history will find this novel unusually subtle, with an emotional range that recalls the best of the Edwardian novelists, E.M. Forster, and his quintessential novel of Edwardian manners, Howard’s End.
Trade cloth edition in very good condition. Dust jacket with intact price point. Full number line starting with 1. Mylar cover included.
“I have spent my life waiting for something to happen,’ she said. ‘And I have come to understand that nothing will. Or it already has, and I blinked during that moment and it’s gone. I don’t know which is worse—to have missed it or to know there is nothing to miss.”
Set among the sweeping skirts and social upheavals of Edwardian London, Falling Angels is a meditation on change, loss, and recovery. Her central characters are two young girls of the same age, whose family plots are situated side-by-side in a cemetery modeled on Highgate. Lavinia Waterhouse is respectably middle-class, devoted, like her conventional, doting mother, to the right way to do things, although suspiciously well-schooled in subjects like funerary sculpture and the English practices of mourning. Her friend Maude Coleman comes from a slightly more privileged and free-thinking background. In contrast with Lavinia’s mother, Maude’s mother Kitty Coleman is well-educated by the standards of the day and it has made her restless and irritable. But neither her reading, nor her gardening, nor her affair with the somber, high-thinking governor of the cemetery is enough for Kitty. She comes alive only when she discovers the women’s suffrage movement, and her devotion to the cause takes her away from Maude in every sense.
The narrative spans exactly the years of Edward VII’s reign, from the morning after his mother Queen Victoria’s death in January 1901 to his own death in May 1910. Chevalier deftly uses the nation’s dramatically different mourning for these two monarchs to signal the social transformations of the period. Readers at ease with English history will find this novel unusually subtle, with an emotional range that recalls the best of the Edwardian novelists, E.M. Forster, and his quintessential novel of Edwardian manners, Howard’s End.
Trade cloth edition in very good condition. Dust jacket with intact price point. Full number line starting with 1. Mylar cover included.
“I have spent my life waiting for something to happen,’ she said. ‘And I have come to understand that nothing will. Or it already has, and I blinked during that moment and it’s gone. I don’t know which is worse—to have missed it or to know there is nothing to miss.”
Set among the sweeping skirts and social upheavals of Edwardian London, Falling Angels is a meditation on change, loss, and recovery. Her central characters are two young girls of the same age, whose family plots are situated side-by-side in a cemetery modeled on Highgate. Lavinia Waterhouse is respectably middle-class, devoted, like her conventional, doting mother, to the right way to do things, although suspiciously well-schooled in subjects like funerary sculpture and the English practices of mourning. Her friend Maude Coleman comes from a slightly more privileged and free-thinking background. In contrast with Lavinia’s mother, Maude’s mother Kitty Coleman is well-educated by the standards of the day and it has made her restless and irritable. But neither her reading, nor her gardening, nor her affair with the somber, high-thinking governor of the cemetery is enough for Kitty. She comes alive only when she discovers the women’s suffrage movement, and her devotion to the cause takes her away from Maude in every sense.
The narrative spans exactly the years of Edward VII’s reign, from the morning after his mother Queen Victoria’s death in January 1901 to his own death in May 1910. Chevalier deftly uses the nation’s dramatically different mourning for these two monarchs to signal the social transformations of the period. Readers at ease with English history will find this novel unusually subtle, with an emotional range that recalls the best of the Edwardian novelists, E.M. Forster, and his quintessential novel of Edwardian manners, Howard’s End.
ISBN 0-525-94581-4
Tracy Chevalier
2001