Description
Rarely does a novel about a protagonist’s obsessive love span over half a century. Victor Hugo, author of Les Misérables and other widely known works, was France’s most celebrated writer in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Adele, his youngest child, forfeited her youthful promise as a writer and composer to pursue a young British soldier as he traveled with his regiment.
After leaving Europe, they spent a lengthy spell in Halifax, Nova Scotia, then on Barbados in the Caribbean. Adele trailed him closely, following his schedule, trying to convince her brother back home that her marriage to Albert Andrew Pinson was about to take place. It never did. Despite social, financial, and intellectual standing, the story is, most clearly, a family tragedy, as Adele’s passion steals her sanity.
Novelist and biographer Mark Bostridge, fascinated in his twenties by the story after seeing Francois Truffaut’s movie, introduces his own unrequited love to merge with Adele’s, an added poignancy as he, too, sees the destructive power of a love story leading to insanity. The 1860s saw the beginning of a saga that continued until Adele’s death in 1915, during World War One.