The Point of View

Stella Rawson is twenty-one, has grown up in an English cathedral close, and is engaged to an aesthetic curate she does not love; in Rome for the spring with her uncle the Canon and her managing aunt, she meets Count Roumovski, a foreign nobleman of the fast embassy set — and the question becomes whose point of view will prevail: the Close's, the curate's, or her own. Glyn wrote Three Weeks, in which a queen seduces a young Englishman on a tiger skin, was banned and parodied for it, and later went to Hollywood and taught the movies the word It. Fifty-nine plates of portraits and street scenes by painters such as Philip de László and William Orpen, spanning 1795 to 1929, catch the society faces and passing city life of Stella's world.