A Green Equinox
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- £9.49
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- £9.49
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the 1973 Booker Prize, A Green Equinox is a beguilingly Rococo “study of love, considered in turn as companionship, sickness and mystic devotion . . . a book whose unusual infatuations are well worth lingering over, and puzzling out” (Russell Davies, The Observer).
Hero Kinoull is an antiquarian bookseller whose sedate life in the picturesque English town of Beaudesert is turned upside down between the spring and autumn equinoxes of a single year. First her quiet but forbidden liaison with Hugh Shafto, the curator of the country’s finest collection of Rococo art, comes to an abrupt halt when she develops an adoration for his straight-talking, do-gooding wife Belle. But this relationship leads to other, even more unexpected feelings for Belle’s widowed mother-in-law, the majestic Kate Shafto, who spends her days tending her garden and sailing her handmade boats in the waters of the miniature archipelago she’s constructed in a disused gravel-pit.
Published two years after Elizabeth Mavor’s most famous work, The Ladies of Llangollen—a biography of two eighteenth-century Irish gentlewomen who scandalized their families by eloping to Wales, where they lived together on their own terms—A Green Equinox is itself an intrepid exploration of gender, female sexuality, and passion: romantic, carnal, and cerebral.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This vibrant and resonant story of love and sickness from Mavor (1927–2013) was shortlisted for the Booker when it was first published in 1973. Hero Kinoull, a bookseller and admirer of cultural artifacts ("I have the Great Sickness... that love affair, sexual almost, with the lost past") is content to be the mistress of Hugh Shafto, an upper-crust art historian of the rococo. Then, after Mavor implies Hero has caught typhoid during an outbreak in their English village of Beaudesert, Hero is in a car accident with Belle, Hugh's activist wife. During their convalescence, Hero becomes smitten with Belle, and is later drawn into Belle's campaign to save a community tree. As drama ratchets up around the typhoid lockdown, Hero takes refuge in a garden paradise created by Hugh's formidable and worldly mother, Kate. "It's really so very, very neurotic attaching yourself to one person after another. It isn't adult of you, you know," Belle says to Hero, after she falls under Kate's spell. The plague sections of this unconventional story feel au courant, as does the timeless exploration of the many different ways to approach love. Mavor's passionate story endures.
