When sixteen-year-old Portia is orphaned, she is plunged into the sophisticated and politely treacherous world of her wealthy half-brother’s home. There she encounters the attractive cad Eddie. To Portia, Eddie is the only reason to be alive, but he fears her gushing love. When he follows her to a seaside resort, the flash of a cigarette lighter in a darkened cinema illuminates a romantic betrayal, and sets in motion a moving and desperate flight of the heart.
Reviewed by Posy Fallowfield in Slightly Foxed Issue 64.
Anguish Revisited
POSY FALLOWFIELD
At boarding school in the late Sixties we had as our English teacher a Miss J. H. B. Jones. Coaxing us self-absorbed teenagers through the A-level syllabus she was diffident, patient and unassuming, and had it not been for a brief conversation in which she suggested I read The Death of the Heart (1938) by Elizabeth Bowen, I’m sorry to say I would by now have forgotten her utterly. But I went off for the long summer holiday and took her advice; I have my Penguin copy fifty years later, and the cover illustration of a young girl wearing an anguished expression still takes me back to those inevitably anguished years . . .
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 64, Winter 2019
Anguish Revisited
At boarding school in the late Sixties we had as our English teacher a Miss J. H. B. Jones. Coaxing us self-absorbed teenagers through the A-level syllabus she was diffident, patient and unassuming,...
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