Customer Reviews

The World Before Her

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I started reading this book because of Venice and George Eliot. It seemed like a perfect escape, and it was. Venice, separated by a hundred years...and it was much more than that too. It is beautifully written and gorgeously observed. The novel is two linked stories, told in alternating chapters. The first one is about Marian Evans, who wrote novels under the pen name of George Eliot. She is on her honeymoon with her handsome young husband. The second story takes place a hundred years later when Caroline Spingold, a young sculptor, arrives in Venice with her older husband to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary...so like Casaubon in Middlemarch (Eliot's book). Both women are trying hard to convince themselves that they are happy and love the men that they have married...alas...the novel explores how Marian and Caroline come to terms with the truth of their feelings. It explores the nature of marriage, the rewards and the price of happiness, the problems of love and work for ambitious women. The book is layered with descriptions of Venetian paintings and with melodies that literally rise from the pages. Weaving the magic of Eliot's stories in a gossamar way, Weisgall ignites two lives for the voracious reader, seductive for the romantic. I hope she writes another one soon....

I adored Deborah Weisgall's dazzling novel, The World Before Her, which has garnered richly-deserved critical praise. This provocative, elegant book tells the intricate and equally compelling stories of two wives a century apart; each woman is an artist - one is George Eliot, the other a modern trophy wife who is herself a sculptor - and their life choices are explored with a breathtaking depth of understanding. Featuring Whistler, Liszt, and the mysteries of Venice, this triumphant book is must-read for anyone interested in literature, music, the fine arts, as well as for anyone who is or has ever been in love and wrestled with its complexities.

I was captivated by "The World Before Her," and stayed up into the wee hours to finish it. Two women in different eras struggle to balance the urge for personal fulfillment with the security and familiarity of a marriage. It was fascinating to get a glimpse into how George Eliot might have tried to cope with the loss of true (if illicit) love by finally achieving social (if stifled) respectability. The modern-day parallel story explores the effects of having chosen the path of safety earlier in life, with ultimately equally ambivalent results. The descriptions are rich and evocative, and the emotions ring true. And don't miss the raffish Whistler flashing his devil-may-care enthusiasm for life. Highly recommended!

Two women one real and one fictional are separated by time, but not necessarily circumstance in Deborah Weisgall's novel. In 1880 George Elliot or Marian Evans as her closest friends knew her, honeymoons in Venice with her new husband John Cross, a loving but delicate man who is younger than Marian by twenty years. Now in her sixties Marion has been wearied by all of the gossip and scandal that has characterized so much of her life, especially with regard to her long and happy union with George H. Lewes, a partnership that she regarded as marriage, even though it involved social ostracism and could have no legal sanction because Lewes's estranged wife was living.

When the painter James McNeill Whistler, spies Marian walking with a gentleman across the Piazza San Marco he is positive that she has escaped with his man to the raptures and romantic delights of Venice. But who is this woman with the beautiful voice and light eyes, holding so steadfast to this gaunt man? His companion Maud Franklin tells him that she is in fact the famed writer George Elliot: "everybody's always talked about her. It makes no difference, though - she's always gotten her way."

Now she's with Cross, Marian can perhaps achieve a measure of comfort, the trip to Venice doing much to assuage her periods of severe depression. Lately, however, she's certain that her ardor has atrophied and weariness seems to have taken its place. She's plagued by fears that perhaps their shell and their connection is all but a pretense. Marian is a woman who is in constant need of reassurance, the ghosts of the past and even her own insecurities about her attractiveness to John always haunting her even though deep down she knows that she's cared for and she's not alone.

Meanwhile, a century later, the thirty-three year old Caroline Springhold arrives in Venice with her wealthy investor husband Malcolm, ostensibly for a holiday but also so that Malcolm to pursue some wealthy business opportunities regarding the restoration of the city's crumbling facades. For a decade Caroline has been married to Malcolm, who from the outset only wanted to take care of her. But lately, she's been feeling angry and unmoored.

The first years of their marriage were marked with a "luxurious expansiveness," and a shimmering exchange involving the material and the spiritual - along with lots of money and art. Lately this assumed grace has coarsened into an argument and indeed, this trip back to Venice, the first for twenty two years since she first came as a teenager with her parents - has unleashed a torrent of insecurities in Caroline mostly regarding her feelings towards Malcolm. At first the gap in their ages need not matter, but now walking the streets of Venice, she's determined to settle her resentment, even as the words "I am happy" are constantly marching through her mind.

Malcolm has proved to be man of largesse and influence, but who is at the end of the day fuelled more by monetary ambition than anything else. His life, and indeed his life with Caroline, has mostly been predicated on money, an attitude, which over the years has led Caroline to feel apprehensive that nothing she has ever done, was essential. She almost feared becoming frivolous, and that her sculptures- little silver figures like Renaissance baubles - have become merely a way to fill time and are an indulgence, particularly in Malcolm's eyes.

It is through both Marian and Caroline's fractured and bitter sweet memories - Marian of her life with George, and Caroline of her affair with Will, a man she new before her marriage to Malcolm - that Weisgall's story is ultimately told. Both women seem to be encapsulated by broken dreams, blighted by the habit of supplication to their husbands as they steadily grow a shell against love and heartbreak, and also spoiled expectations. Although Marian believes she has at last found peace with John; it isn't until he unexpectedly jumps from their hotel balcony into the Grand Canal that she is forced into the pain of rejection, the memory of despair, revived all bitter and fresh in her life.

Imagery is profound in this novel, especially regarding the light and the water. Light frequently reflects up from the water's surface, lighting up parts of the characters' hearts that are constantly kept hidden. From the opening pages Weisgall's prose has a gorgeous muscularity, even as she pounds us with some of the most kaleidoscopic descriptions of a humid and misty Venice in both 1880 and 1980. The city, always floating on water, seems to have a sensual magic and a "rotting impossibility" that gradually mocks Marion's dream of a wedding trip and her misconceptions of John's kindness.

Throughout Weisgall establishes some interesting parallels between Marian and Caroline's struggles: both seek passion, yet they're both constantly bulldozed by the aching defeat of their dreams as well as their shattered relationships - Marian with her brother, Isaac who never forgave her for living out of wedlock with George, Lewes and Caroline with her father who died unexpectedly when she was sixteen and who failed to realize her artistic talents.

Certainly, Marian's choices were absolutely outrageous for society in 1880's. All her life she had been the subject of much speculation, the gossip surrounding her reflective of her own discomfort with the pain of marital transgression. For her part, Caroline is left with far more options. Although she's a woman who once equated legitimacy - and marriage with happiness, it seems as though many years pass before Caroline actually takes advantage of her choices and realizes that she probably married Malcolm for his money. It is not surprising then that both women eventually rebel against the strictures of their time as they begin to grow and change and as they attempt to search for a new measure of security and hope in their respective worlds. Mike Leonard June 08.

This interwoven story alternating between 1880/1980 visitors (centering around George Eliot and a woman artist and both their financial investor husbands)start off interesting and well written. The novel does provide a fascinating prospective of George Eliot's personal life. However, as the story progresses, the characters in the 1980 story become increasing 2 dimensional. A disappointing ending to a very promising start.

This book was lovely when it focused on George Eliot, her new husband John, and their time in Venice and beyond. I wanted to savor every image, every word. Then Caroline Springold and her husband Malcolm rudely intruded and diminished that wonderful illusion. I now believe that I could have easily skipped every single chapter that took place in the 1980's and not missed a thing. I do wish that the author had written more about George Lewes and also James McNeil Whistler and his paramour--they were very appealing characters that deserve more time, more attention from this potentially amazing author.

Deborah Weisgall has written a riveting tale of two women a century apart. They are connected by place and sense of disconnection in their current marriages. She creates a mood and landscape that draws you in. This is a book you want to read cover to cover in one sitting.

The storyline about George Eliot and her past love affair with George Lewes, as well as current emotionally and physically barren marriage with Johnnie Cross, was very compelling. This kept me coming back to the book. But the modern-day love story was about the least compelling narrative I have ever read. I didn't care hardly at all about this character from beginning to end; I hardly recognized the person she ends up marrying because he was so poorly developed. Weisgall is never a bad writer and sometimes a pitch-perfect one; but I thought one half of this book just didn't work.

This is a stunningly written book full of evocative images and intriguing characters w/ 2 compelling love stories. Weisgall transports us to the Venice of 1880 w/ the still wounded Eliot, her Johnnie on her arm but her George in her heart. We watch her cope w/ falling out of love. Caroline in the Venice of 1980 is trying to extricate herself from a controlling older husband and we watch her fall in love. Middlemarch is in good hands under Weisgall's deft touch. George Elliot comes to life with a wonderful combination of historic facts and creative fiction. This is a fascinating and absorbing read-transformative!

This is not the type of novel that I normally gravitate toward. I was seduced by the image, and promise of Venice, Italy. I visited and fell in love with Venice this past April; Venice with its romantic vistas, cocky godoliers, palpable history and shabby, old world elegance.

Beautifully written with emotions revealed on every page, I could not put this novel down. Descriptions have been given so I will not elaborate, I found myself highlighting sentences and passages that seemed to have such a ring of universal truth. There are two stories entwined here, neither like the other yet neither dissimilar. The book is written from the point of view of the women yet we are totally aware of the husbands' viewpoints. The men are not sympathetic but I struggled to not judge them harshly. That I even had to think about judgement is testament to this author's ability to evoke reality. More than a story of two women, it is the story of marriage and all its joys, sorrows and complications.

The story does alternate between each woman and each century and this style I sometimes find confusing. Although I didn't like it here, I was so engrossed in the drama that I hardly noticed.