Customer Reviews

The Incomplete Amorist

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Edith Nesbit was a social and political liberal who wrote some of my favorite children's novels. So I looked forward to reading this adult novel. It was published in 1906 and tells the story of naive Betty Desmond who, after her mother died, grew up with her unemotional vicar stepfather in a rural parish.

Bored with country life and the chores of a parsonage, she is out drawing one day when she meets Mr. Vernon, a painter who courts women as a harmless game. Vernon also has little to do, and they start meeting with their art supplies in the forest. He paints her portrait and helps her with her artistic skills. Their attraction to each other alarms her prudish stepfather who sends her off to a French boarding school.

Mr. Vernon and Betty meet again in Paris where a complex love quartet forms with a former lover of Vernon's and his best friend. Each of the four people think they are in love with the two people of the opposite sex and must make up their mind which is their true love.

Intrigue, miscommunication, love, guilt, and jealousy all mix with Nesbit's charming writing style to produce enjoyable characters in a dilemma that kept this reader interested to the last page. The novel is a comedy of manners that relies more on charming characters than witty ones. The general good will gives the book an innocence that comes easily to an author who wrote primarily for children.

E. Nesbit was so inclined to flout convention in her personal life and in her writing for children that I wouldn't have been at all surprised, after reading it, to find that another person entirely had written this book.

Betty is the step-daughter of a very dry vicar who does not show her the least affection. She channels all of her frustration and yearning for a more interesting life into art, so is emotionally very susceptible to the flirtations of Robert Temple, a visiting artist. After a near-indiscretion, her stepfather sends her to Paris to study art. Due to circumstances she ends up on her own and leading a far more adventurous life than she could have imagined.

The story of how Betty develops her sense of independence and purpose and the depictions of her life as a young artist in Paris are pleasant reading. Nesbit barely touches on the social ills of the time, rather surprisingly, though Betty's encounters with a prostitute (with a heart of gold, of course) hints at these.

While the characters are all standard stock (naive but strong country girl, a fashionable lady of the world, a roue who finds himself attracted to said country girl, a stalwart gentleman with all the English virtues), Nesbit treats them with a certain sincerity and warmth that makes them more alive than many have and Betty is an endearing heroine.