A Quiet Adjustment: A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
"A first-rate example of a literary historical novel." —Regan Upshaw, San Francisco Chronicle
In his "Byron trilogy," Benjamin Markovits lovingly reinvents the nineteenth-century novel, true to its perfect prose, penetrating insight, and simmering passions. Inspired by the actual biography of Lord Byron—the greatest literary figure and most notorious sex symbol of his age—Markovits re-imagines Byron’s marriage to the capable, intellectual, and tormented Annabella and the scandal that broke open their lives and riveted the world around them: Byron’s incestuous relationship with his impetuous half-sister, Gus. Their very different understandings of love and one’s obligations to society lead them all—and the reader—headlong to a devastating conclusion.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When Lord Byron married Annabella Milbanke in 1815, neither anticipated the epic scandal that would ensue, one that novelist Markovits (Fathers and Daughters, etc.) captures beautifully in this elegant reconstruction, focused entirely on Annabella. Divided into three sections ("Courtship," "Marriage" and "Separation") the book opens as 19-year-old Annabella acknowledges her own desire for fame and power, or what her mother, Judy, calls "scope." In the marriage section, Annabella's vision of Byron, whom she knew more through his poetry and his two-year epistolary pursuit of her than in person, shatters on living with the real personality a compound of debts, moodiness and one big guilty secret. Markovits makes her discoveries suspenseful, and the secret's revelation gothic. The wrenching "adjustment" that follows in the marriage finds Annabella, ever observant, using Byron's secret to craft his ultimate punishment. Markovits's choice of an ornate Jamesian style captures every nuance of Annabella's shift from the victimized wife to the sinister deliberateness of the vengeful ex-spouse. As she remarks at the end about her husband, "I feel like I have been reaching towards him all my life, without the warmth of his affection, the cold hand of love." Markovits plumbs the very depths of this passionate chill.
