Love: A Virago Modern Classic

Description

A gentle romance begins innocently enough in the stalls of a London theatre where Catherine is enjoying her ninth and Christopher his thirty-sixth visit to the same play. He is a magnificent young man with flame-coloured hair. She is the sweetest little thing in a hat. There is just one complication: Christopher is twenty-five, while Catherine is just a little bit older. Flattered by the passionate attentions of youth, Catherine, with marriage and motherhood behind her, is at first circumspect, but finally succumbs to her lover's charms. The engaging humour of this autobiographical novel blunts the bitter edge of irony in the hypocrisy of 1920s society.

A greatly admired literary figure of her time, Elizabeth von Arnim was born in 1866 and brought up in England. She spent later years in Switzerland, the French Riviera and America, where she died in 1941.

'Worldly, sharp, witty ... Try to write like that, and her gift will seem very enviable and elusive' Terence de Vere White *'She has a wild sense of comedy and a vision - continually thwarted though it was - of potential happiness' Penelope Mortimer