Love and Lucy

About the book

James Macartney is a successful solicitor, and his wife Lucy presides over an apparently comfortable household in Onslow Square. Their son Lancelot supplies warmth and amusement that James's guarded manner does not readily express. A dinner party introduces the social circle through which the marriage's less visible needs begin to emerge. Hewlett announces that this is a romance of inward lives: respectable clothes and settled habits do not prevent people from imagining radically different possibilities. The narration moves between amused observation and close attention to emotional vulnerability, treating conversation and silence as consequential events. Lucy's responses to the people around her expose the distance between being securely established in a marriage and feeling fully recognized by the person with whom one shares it.

• Marriage and recognition
• Hidden emotional lives
• Respectability and desire

Why read it

The contrast between Lucy's playful intimacy with her son and James's reserve makes the household's emotional pattern clear before the dinner guests arrive.

English Dodd, Mead and Company edition of 1916