December Love

A woman of sixty falls in love with a young man in Edwardian London, and every friend, servant and acquaintance watches to see what she will do about it. Hichens made his name at twenty-nine with The Green Carnation, an anonymous satire on Wilde withdrawn after the trials; this very long 1922 novel is his cruellest, and the cruelty is the world's, not the author's. Fifty-nine plates, among them Munch and Sickert, gather summer landscapes and portraits of the famous to hold the long Edwardian light against the cruelty of the watching world.