Henry - Eliot, Elizabeth

. .

Résumé :
'The trouble with you, Anne, is that you're always imagining things.' Who had said that? Probably mother. Or the governess before she left to get married. How disagreeable, and it was all the fault of the sub-conscious. . . . Why didn't the sub-conscious ever turn up things like: 'Anne, how beautiful you are looking today.' Or even: 'That's a good girl finishing up all your dinner.' Anne Palliser is insecure, morbid, and a bit off-balance-in other words, a perfect Elizabeth Eliot narrator. She escapes an overbearing mother and moves to London, working as secretary to the eccentric Lady Merton and dating a detective novelist. But her self-absorbed and irresponsible brother Henry remains a central focus. In the years after running away from school to join the circus, Henry marries, divorces, keeps a mistress, gambles, and flirts with Lady Merton. Now he plans to marry a doctor and turn the family home into a maternity hospital. What could go wrong? Anne observes it all in unique style-daft, brilliant, and dark by turn, but always hilarious. Henry is Elizabeth Eliot's acclaimed second novel. Her debut, Alice, and two subsequent novels, Mrs. Martell and Cecil, have also been reprinted by Furrowed Middlebrow and Dean Street Press. They feature a new introduction by Elizabeth Crawford. This novel has a tart and unique flavour of its own, and the author displays her most amusing and delightful stylistic trick, which is to have the last word Daily Telegraph Delightful light-heartedness, malicious wit and humanity lurking beneath the surface Times Literary Supplement

Biographie:
Lady Germaine Elizabeth Olive Eliot was born in London on 13 April 1911, the daughter of Montague Charles Eliot, the 8th Earl of St Germans, and Helen Agnes Post. She twice married-first to Major Thomas James in 1932, then to Captain Hon. Kenneth George Kinnaird, the 12th Baron Kinnaird, in 1950. Both marriages ended in divorce. She applied for American citizenship in 1971. She published five novels, the first of which, Alice (1949), was a Book Society Choice. Her non-fiction Heiresses and Coronets (1960, aka They All Married Well), about prominent marriages between wealthy Americans and titled Europeans in the late Victorian and Edwardian period, was a success on both sides of the Atlantic. Elizabeth Eliot died in New York in 1991.