CANR
WORK TITLE: In Pursuit of Love
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NATIONALITY: British
LAST VOLUME: CANR 199
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Attended Westminster School and Oxford University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Worked for British Broadcasting Corporation Television.
AWARDS:Gladstone Memorial Prize, Oxford University; Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, for Florence Nightingale.
WRITINGS
Adapted Brittain’s Letters from a Lost Generation for a series on BBC Radio Four. Contributor to publications, including newspapers and journals.
SIDELIGHTS
Mark Bostridge has collaborated with others to produce two well- received books on twentieth-century British feminist and writer Vera Brittain. The first, Vera Brittain: A Life, written with Paul Berry and published in 1996, “offers a comprehensive picture of its subject,” including “her personal life, university education, war experiences, and later civilian career as a writer and lecturer,” remarked Caroline A. Mitchell in Library Journal. Brittain (1893-1970) is best known for an autobiography she published in 1933, Testament of Youth, in which she draws upon correspondence with her brother, fiancé, and several friends during World War I; she also recounts her own experiences as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse during the war. Brittain credited these experiences with turning her into a pacifist, a stance she maintained throughout World War II, despite its great unpopularity and the detrimental effect it had on her writing career.
The correspondence at the heart of Testament of Youth is reprinted along with all of the letters exchanged between the five friends, with explanatory notes, in the 1999 volume Letters from a Lost Generation: The First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends, Roland Leighton, Edward Brittain, Victor Richardson, Geoffrey Thurlow, edited by Bostridge and Alan Bishop. Brittain’s “friends” were her only brother, Edward Brittain, her fiancé, Roland Leighton, and two other young men, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow, all of who attended the same preparatory school and in 1914, at the start of World War I, were of age to volunteer to fight. The letters the young men wrote to Brittain and hers in return reflect a youthful naiveté about war fueled by patriotic fervor, then growing disillusionment, and the necessary acknowledgment of death as each of the men was in turn killed in action. “The collection is unique because these letters span the entire war, showing both male and female perspectives,” remarked Mary F. Salony in a review for the Library Journal. Writing for the London Times Literary Supplement, Caroline Moorehead described Letters from a Lost Generation as “beautifully edited and with excellent notes—though more would have been welcome,” adding that “[the book] makes almost unbearable reading, particularly when, one by one, [the young men’s] voices fall silent.”
As editor of Lives for Sale: Biographers’ Tales, published in 2004, Bostridge presents a collection of essays by thirty-three noted biographers. The book focuses primarily on British biographers examining the various aspects of writing biographies, including both the difficulties and rewards.
In the book’s preface, Bostridge comments on the various contributors, noting: “Here are not only the established names, but also the rising stars of the profession.” The author continues: “These are biographers’ tales of the ups and downs of life writing: of shocking discoveries and frustrating dead ends, strange literary haunting and curses, bitter professional rivalries, and of ways in which the biographical imagination can be aroused by a sense of place or the touch of a letter.” Bostridge also comments that some contributors write in support of the biography while others “express disenchantment with attempts to capture another human being in the pages of a book.”
Among the book’s contributors are Fiona MacCarthy, Graham Robb, Andrew Roberts, Hermione Lee, Richard Holmes, and Antonia Fraser. Bostridge also contributes an essay to the collection titled “Ipplepen.” Eric C. Shoaf, writing for Library Journal, wrote that Lives for Sale “will be useful in specialized biography and literature collections.”
For his next book, Bostridge turns his attention to one of the icons of the Victorian Era. Florence Nightingale: The Making of an Icon, published in England as Florence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend, examines the life and work of the founder of modern nursing who was also a pioneer in social reform. “In order to uncover who this extraordinary woman really was, Mark Bostridge has had to sift through 150 years of mythmaking,” wrote Frances Wilson in a review for the London Times. Also commenting on the mythical status of Nightingale and Bostridge’s approach to her life, London Observer contributor Lucy Lethbridge wrote: “In this fascinating biography, written with clear-eyed respect and affection for its subject, Mark Bostridge examines and dismantles the many myths, both hagiographical and debunking, that have hardened like barnacles around the real story of Florence Nightingale.”
Addressing the myths and stories about Nightingale and her family and friends, the author writes, for example, that the rumors of her having syphilis and of being a lesbian are likely false. He also presents a different view of Nightingale’s mother, Fanny Nightingale, claiming that she was not tyrannical or bent on social climbing. While he debunks some myths concerning Nightingale, the author also provides an in-depth look at her life and accomplishments. On the personal side of Nightingale, several reviewers noted that the author provides an excellent examination of Nightingale’s spiritual life. “He is especially good on the spiritual perplexity that surrounded his subject’s calling to nurse the sick,” wrote Brian Dillon for the London Telegraph. In her review for the London Observer, Lethbridge wrote: “Bostridge is particularly good on Florence’s religious faith, and he has read widely among the influences and ideas that informed it.”
The author also examines many of Nightingale’s other personal traits that led her to her calling and beliefs. He points out the high intelligence she exhibited beginning at a young age and discusses how she early on formed a strong desire and determination to accomplish something with her life. This desire led her to reject marriage early on so she could reach her goals. As expected, Bostridge also details Nightingale’s many accomplishments in the areas of nursing and public health, especially in the area of hospital hygiene. He discusses Nightingale’s initiation of systematic training for hospital nurses and notes that even when she became ill with brucellosis and was confined to her bed for many years, she still wrote an extensive report focusing on India and its public health problems. For his biography, the author draws on previously unpublished material, including newly revealed family papers.
“Mark Bostridge is to be applauded for his diligence in winnowing the vast Nightingale archive of 14,000 letters as well as the rich documentary sources at Claydon House to produce this highly readable and balanced account of an extraordinary woman ahead of her time,” wrote Helen Rappaport in a review for History Today. Slate Web site contributor Michael Chase-Levenson noted: “The shelves are cluttered with biographies of Nightingale; Bostridge’s won’t be the last, but for now it’s surely the best. He shows great care with the overwhelming mass of material …, sorting subtle personal relationships tactfully, and never pressing such a large and angular life into chewable tablets of hypothesis.”
(open new)Bostridge profiles another historical figure in In Pursuit of Love: The Search for Victor Hugo’s Daughter. In it, he chronicles the life of Adèle Hugo, daughter of the celebrated writer and politician, Victor. When Adèle was a child, she moved with her family to the island of Jersey. Her father was distancing himself from the seat of power of new ruler Louis-Napoleon. On Jersey, Adèle became acquainted with Albert Pinson and soon fell in love with him. Adèle became obsessed with Albert and was distraught when he left Jersey to join the military. She moved with her family to the nearby island of Guernsey, where she pined for Albert. When the military sent Albert to Halifax, Adèle followed him there. She followed him to his next post, in Barbados. Ultimately, Albert married another woman, while Adèle spiraled into mental illness. She was ultimately placed in an asylum in Paris. Throughout the book, Bostridge discusses his research process and highlights connections between Adèle’s story and his own history.
A Kirkus Reviews writer described In Pursuit of Love as “a nuanced portrait of an enigmatic woman and a biographer in pursuit of her story.” Reviewing the book in Times Literary Supplement, Norma Clarke called it “a compelling experiment in biography-cum-memoir.” Rupert Christiansen, critic in the London Telegraph Online, commented: “Bostridge handles delicate material tactfully and without self-pity. The result is a book full of pain and sadness, but one that is a melancholy pleasure to read.”(close new)
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, October 15, 2008, Mark Knoblauch, review of Florence Nightingale: The Making of an Icon, p. 10.
California Bookwatch, December, 2008, review of Florence Nightingale.
Guardian (London, England), January 28, 2006, Mark Bostridge, “The Importance of Being Honest,” article by author about diaries.
History Today, October, 2008, Helen Rappaport, review of Florence Nightingale, p. 67.
Independent (London, England), October 10, 2008, Jan Marsh, “Nursing Her Grievances,” review of Florence Nightingale.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2008, review of Florence Nightingale; June 15, 2024, review of In Pursuit of Love: The Search for Victor Hugo’s Daughter.
Library Journal, April 1, 1996, Caroline A Mitchell, review of Vera Brittain: A Life, p. 92; February 1, 1999, Mary F. Salony, review of Letters from a Lost Generation: The First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends, Roland Leighton, Edward Brittain, Victor Richardson, Geoffrey Thurlow, p. 10; January 1, 2005, Eric C. Shoaf, review of Lives for Sale: Biographers’ Tales, p. 112; October 1, 2008, Ingrid Levin, review of Florence Nightingale, p. 77.
London Telegraph Online, March 24, 2024, Rupert Christiansen, “How Victor Hugo’s Daughter Stalked an Unlucky British Soldier Across the Atlantic,” review of In Pursuit of Love.
New Statesman, October 6, 2008, Baroness Warnock, “Christian Soldier: Mary Warnock on the Remarkable Public Career of a Great Victorian,” review of Florence Nightingale, p. 52.
Nursing Standard, February 4, 2009, Betty Kershaw, review of Florence Nightingale, p. 30.
Observer (London, England), October 19, 2008, Lucy Lethbridge, “This Matron Was No Battleaxe,” review of Florence Nightingale.
Telegraph (London, England), October 7, 2008, Judith Flanders, review of Florence Nightingale; November 10, 2008, Brian Dillon, review of Florence Nightingale.
Times (London, England), September 21, 2008, Frances Wilson, review of Florence Nightingale.
Times Literary Supplement (London, England), December 18, 1998, Caroline Moorehead, review of Letters from a Lost Generation, p. 26; July 26, 2024, Norma Clarke, “Stalking the World: The Lovelorn Quest of Victor Hugo’s Daughter,” review of In Pursuit of Love, p. 7.
ONLINE
Slate, http:// www.slate.com/ (November 4, 2008), Michael Chase-Levenson, “Florence Nightingale’s Fever: Diagnose this Driven Nurse at Your Own Risk.”
Spectator Online, http://www.spectator.co.uk/ (October 22, 2008), Charlotte Moore, “A Mystic and an Administrator,” review of Florence Nightingale.*
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mark Bostridge is a British writer and critic, known for his historical biographies.
Life and career
He was educated at Westminster School[1] and read Modern History at St Anne's College, Oxford, from 1979 to 1984.[2] At Oxford, he was awarded the Gladstone Memorial Prize. After university, he worked for a time for Shirley Williams, then President of the SDP. Later, he worked for BBC Television.
His first book was Vera Brittain: A Life, co-written with Paul Berry and published in 1995. This biography of the writer and peace campaigner Vera Brittain was shortlisted for the two major non-fiction prizes of its day, the Whitbread Prize and the NCR Book Award as well as the Fawcett Prize. Bostridge's next Brittain project was a collaboration with Alan Bishop. Their edition of her letters was published in 1998 as Letters from a Lost Generation, and Bostridge adapted the letters for a BBC Radio Four series starring Amanda Root as Brittain and Rupert Graves as Roland Leighton, who was killed in the First World War.
Bostridge's Lives For Sale, an anthology of biographers' tales, was published in 2004. In 2008, he published Florence Nightingale: The Woman and Her Legend, the first major biography of Florence Nightingale in over half a century, which was awarded the 2009 Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography and named as a Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2008 and an Atlantic Magazine top book of the year. 'It will not be superseded for generations', wrote the reviewer in the Daily Telegraph [3]
In 2008, Bostridge also published Because You Died, a selection of Vera Brittain's First World War poetry and prose, to mark the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice. In May 2009, Screen Daily reported that he was working closely with BBC Films on a screen adaptation of Brittain's Testament of Youth.[4][5] In December 2014, Bostridge's study Vera Brittain and the First World War, containing new research about Testament of Youth's evolution, and an account of the dramatisations of the book culminating in the new film version starring Alicia Vikander as Vera Brittain and Kit Harington as Roland Leighton, was published by Bloomsbury.
In January 2014, Penguin UK published Bostridge's The Fateful Year, a portrait of England in 1914: "a year that started in peace and ended in war".[6] The book was shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History in 2015.
In June 2016, Bostridge was one of a group of biographers, historians, and other academics who signed a letter to The Times protesting at the erection of a statue to Mary Seacole at St Thomas' Hospital in London. In interviews Bostridge explained that he was not opposed to a statue to Seacole, but to the siting of it at the hospital where Florence Nightingale founded her nurse training school in 1860, influencing the development of nursing throughout the world. Bostridge argues that Seacole was not a "pioneer nurse" as some of the statue campaigners maintain. He also points to the way in which Nightingale's enormous contributions to public health are now commonly and mistakenly attributed to Seacole by a wide range of British institutions that, he says, should "frankly know better".
In an article published in the Times Literary Supplement in January 2020, Bostridge, who had introduced a new edition of the diaries of Francis Kilvert revealed that he has recently donated his diary to the Bodleian Library in Oxford.[7]
In 2024 Bloomsbury published his In Pursuit of Love. The Search for Victor Hugo's Daughter, an innovative biography-cum-memoir. The Sunday Times described the book as 'Gloriously rich and capacious', while the reviewer in the Daily Telegraph stated that 'Bostridge...produces something of haunting beauty and stylistic grace'.
He is a brother of the tenor Ian Bostridge. They are the great-grandsons of the Millwall goalkeeper, John "Tiny" Joyce.[8]
Mark Bostridge's books include Vera Brittain: A Life, shortlisted for the Whitbread Biography Prize, the NCR Award for Non-Fiction and the Fawcett Prize, the bestselling Letters from a Lost Generation, Florence Nightingale. The Woman and Her Legend, awarded the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, and The Fateful Year, England 1914, shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize. He has written widely for national newspapers and journals, and appeared on television and radio.
QUOTED: "a nuanced portrait of an enigmatic woman and a biographer in pursuit of her story."
Bostridge, Mark IN PURSUIT OF LOVE Bloomsbury Continuum (NonFiction None) $28.00 9, 3 ISBN: 9781399416023
Biography and autobiography merge in this intriguing tale about Victor Hugo's daughter.
Bostridge, author of Letters From a Lost Generation and Florence Nightingale, turns inward in this detailed personal reflection on the tragic story of Hugo's daughter, Adèle (1830-1915), who's well known thanks to Truffaut's L'Histoire d'Adèle H. "As I pursue Adèle Hugo in the pages that follow," writes the author, "fragments of my story will shadow hers." Throughout, Bostridge relishes digressions on many topics, including Victor Hugo and his family and the author's own life. "In writing about other people's lives," he reflects, "you learn to be wary of your imagination .Meanwhile the rational part of oneself remains earthbound." After Louis-Napoleon's rise to power, the Hugo family moved to the island of Jersey--with Bostridge figuratively in tow. He seems as obsessed with Adèle as she was with Albert Pinson. As the author recounts, Adèle pursued him, and when he left to join the military, she was crushed. The family then moved to the neighboring island of Guernsey. Adèle, then 26, experienced periods of "moody introspection, symptomatic of her distress at Albert Pinson's departure." A few years later, she traveled to the Isle of Wight. Bostridge is certain Pinson promised to marry her; he shares a photo of Pinson in uniform, as well as a marriage license, dated 1861. Apparently, Pinson visited the Hugo family, and shortly after, he was stationed to Halifax, unmarried. Adèle followed. At this point, the author examines her "acute mental disturbance." When Pinson was assigned to Barbados, Adèle followed again. Pinson next moved to Dublin, where he married, and Adèle, suffering from mental illness, returned to Paris, where she eventually entered a private asylum. Bostridge's journey is "messy, unpredictable, and contradictory"--yet rarely boring.
A nuanced portrait of an enigmatic woman and a biographer in pursuit of her story.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Bostridge, Mark: IN PURSUIT OF LOVE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A797463240/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f0ecc6e6. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.
QUOTED: "a compelling experiment in biography-cum-memoir."
IN PURSUIT OF LOVE
The search for Victor Hugo's daughter
MARK BOSTRIDGE
288pp. Bloomsbury Continuum. 20 [pounds sterling].
The presiding spirit of this book is Victor Hugo (1802-85), writer, political refugee and visionary, whose nineteen-year-old daughter Leopoldine drowned in the Seine at Villequier in 1843. Mark Bostridge begins In Pursuit of Love: The search for Victor Hugo's daughter with an account of this boating accident, which also took the lives of Leopoldine's young husband, his uncle and his cousin. Hugo, who was travelling with his mistress, Juliette Drouet, in the south of France, was devastated when news of the tragedy reached him. His grief was intense and prolonged, for Leopoldine had been the child he loved above all others, the sun of his life and the fire of his soul, as he later wrote, asking God how he could do such a thing. In death she grew into his muse.
The disaster on the Seine "went to the core" of Hugo's life and writing, Bostridge observes. Anybody picking up this book who knows anything about Hugo will probably assume that the daughter alluded to but not named in the title is Leopoldine. Wrong. It is his younger daughter and youngest child, Adele, the only one of his four children to outlive him, of whom Bostridge goes in pursuit; and her long life--"messy, unpredictable and contradictory, full of large gaps" and many "imponderables"--was marked by a different kind of drowning.
The Villequier churchyard in which the Hugo women are buried and the museum that displays relics having become for him a place of pilgrimage, Bostridge seeks to understand his fascination. Like Hugo, whose formidable creative energies found expression in poetry, plays, pamphlets and gargantuan novels such as Les Miserables, and who used his own life so extensively and inventively that Stephane Mallarme described him as "poetry in person", Bostridge wants to "insert" himself into the story. He wants to be "at the physical heart of it". The result is a compelling experiment in biographycum-memoir, guided by the conviction that someone else's life offers a "prism through which to revisit or examine parts of one's own". Hugo's oracular pronouncement in Les Contemplations is the book's epigraph: "My life is yours, your life is mine, you live what I see: our destiny is one. Take this mirror then and see yourself in it ... When I speak to you of myself, I tell you about yourselves too".
Bostridge takes the mirror. He can hear the protests in advance and faces them down: "To a greater or lesser extent, we all--readers as well as writers --view another person's life and character refracted through our own personalities and experiences. It should be obvious that we have no alternative". Speaking to us of himself, he admits that he has tried over many years to write about the dramatic events on the river at Villequier. He has studied the processes of drowning, imagined what it might feel like and attempted to tell Leopoldine's story as fiction. But "the appropriate elements have never quite meshed together to make the scene believable". Now he recalls almost drowning as a child while on a family holiday at Woolacombe in Devon. If this memory doesn't explain his fascination, it offers another element that meshes differently. It brings back his father's look of "lower-lip-biting mild vexation that was his customary default expression"; and Bostridge's feeling that he was "never man enough" for a father whose love for a dead daughter (Bostridge's baby half-sister) had once unmanned him. Throughout the book seemingly simplistic parallels carry surprising undertows --a layering process that is handled deftly, with a dash of comic timing here and there, as when, reflecting on his father's unwilling show of grief, as well as his own discomfort, he ponders being a gay boy drawn to write about women (Bostridge has written acclaimed books on Vera Brittain and Florence Nightingale) whose father not only habitually and derisively called his son "Princess", but apparently also referred to him as "my daughter" throughout a conversation with the headmaster of Westminster School.
The search for Adele takes Bostridge to Paris, Jersey, Guernsey, Nova Scotia and Barbados. He paces out the places she lived, noting modern developments, depicting himself in hotels, archives; interviewing locals, setting scenes. As a biographer stalking his "prey" he is often hapless, sometimes clueless. He has what he describes as "maiden aunt ways" (whatever they are, but certainly a slur on unmarried women with nephews and nieces) and can be unnerved by the force of his obsession. Towards the end he feels himself to be the pursued, as if the story he uncovered was shadowing him, "dogging my footsteps, almost as if it were in some way prefiguring my own destiny".
Adele was twenty-two in 1852, when Hugo--a prominent figure in French politics and opposed to Louis-Napoleon, whose coup d'etat brought in the Second Empire--became an exile. He fled with his family to Jersey, where they lived for three years before being forced to move to the smaller island of Guernsey. Exile was painful but advantageous for Hugo the prolific writer. He took for granted that his two adult sons and surviving daughter would share it with him and his wife (also Adele), who assured him that his family, "which exists because of you alone, should be sacrificed not only to your honour but also to the image you present". (This was to be the theme for the decades that followed, as the cult of Victor Hugo intensified.) Juliette Drouet came too. On Jersey she was lodged at a nearby inn, and on Guernsey Hugo installed her in a villa that was so close to the family house, she could see him at his toilette in a tub on the terrace.
Adele's task was to record her father's table talk for posterity in a "Journal of Exile", a task so closely supervised that it was more of a collaboration, except that she began to feel she was "a slave to duty". Her job was also to be for her father everything the dead and idealized Leopoldine could no longer be, to "repair the irreparable", as Hugo's biographer Jean-Marc Hovasse put it. She had some literary ambition; she was musical and spent hours practising the piano and composing; she resisted marriage, but enjoyed flirtation and was a "dark-eyed sombre beauty"; she fell in love.
The man she loved--a "worthless trooper", in Hugo's words--was an English soldier named Albert Pinson. He came to the house for the table-turning seances that enlivened long evenings and through which the spirit of Leopoldine was invoked. He was a gambler who loved horses and fine clothes. How far he reciprocated Adele's feelings is unclear, but he would have been aware that in financial and social terms she was a good catch. It seems he agreed to marry her. But mostly he was absent and she loved at a distance. In December 1856 she suffered a physical and mental breakdown that worried her mother sufficiently to persuade her husband to let them have a break from the grandeur of heroic exile for a while. But her life remained "impossible, odious, horrible". She began plotting her escape, determined to be Pinson's wife.
In 1861, when her father was in Brussels and her mother in Paris, Adele travelled to the Isle of Wight and to London, and met Pinson. His regiment was due to leave for a posting to Halifax, Nova Scotia. She may have told him she was pregnant; she may have threatened suicide. A marriage licence was drawn up in December, valid for three months. In order to ensure her dowry, she returned home to get her father's permission. Hugo wanted to know more--was this Englishman worthy of the daughter of France's national genius? Adele persuaded him (he was in any case deep in revisions and corrections to Les Miserables) and Pinson arrived for a short visit on Christmas Day, only to leave "abruptly" the next day. Nobody knows what happened. No wedding plans were made. The following summer Adele left home and made her way to Halifax, where she was to spend the next three years stalking Pinson, her behaviour becoming more and more eccentric. When the regiment was posted to Barbados, she followed him there too. She kept in touch with her family. Her mother wanted to go out and bring her back, but died before seeing her again; her father and brothers sent money, fearing the shame her actions might bring given the "exceptional perils and the exceptional glory" (as Mme Hugo put it) of the Hugo name.
Everything about Adele was to be kept secret, and some lies were told. She lied by saying she was married: Hugo put a notice to that effect in the Guernsey Gazette, claiming the marriage had taken place in Paris. It produced a "cold but polite" letter from Pinson denying it and asking the family to take her home. Hugo was enraged, not so much on Adele's behalf, but because of the "dishonour" to himself. But he was also concerned to protect his daughter's honour with a view to a possible future marriage. Guided by patriarchal love and compassion, he tried to make the best of a mess. Bostridge hardly needs to point to the contrast between Hugo's life of unbridled sexual appetite and creative satisfaction, and Adele's misadventures. Was she driven by an overwhelming love that became a destructive obsession, or was hers a familiar tale of stifled nineteenth-century womanhood sufficient to drive a person mad? As for Pinson, Bostridge tries to be generous and resist his "fermenting prejudice" against him. There simply isn't the evidence to understand his motivations, which may have included affection and sympathy; but he was understandably troubled by the obsessive pursuit. Bostridge identifies with Adele. He has his own experiences of unrequited love and of mental disturbance brought on by trauma.
In 1870, with the fall of the Second Empire, Victor Hugo returned in triumph to Paris. Adele returned shortly afterwards and was discreetly accommodated in a nursing home. Hugo visited, saw that she seemed content, noted that she was "like ice" and concluded that her separateness was "without sadness". She listened to voices in her head. In 1885, when Hugo died, she inherited vast wealth and was moved to a grander establishment, the Chateau de Suresnes, where for the next thirty years she occupied her own little villa and was attended by a small staff of servants as well as the asylum attendants.
Norma Clarke is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Kingston University. Her most recent book is a family memoir, Not Speaking, 2019
Caption: Adele Hugo, c.1858
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
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Clarke, Norma. "Stalking the world: The lovelorn quest of Victor Hugo's daughter." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6330, 26 July 2024, p. 7. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A803231261/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=46c7485a. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.
QUOTED: "Bostridge handles delicate material tactfully and without self-pity. The result is a book full of pain and sadness, but one that is a melancholy pleasure to read."
Byline: Rupert Christiansen
In writing biographies of Florence Nightingale and the campaigning pacifist Vera Brittain, Mark Bostridge focused on two women of exceptional wilfulness and strong character. His new book runs "in pursuit" of someone totally different -- the pathetic and elusive figure of Victor Hugo's younger daughter Adèle, whose life was dominated first by her egomaniacal father and then by her neurotically obsessive infatuation with a British army officer.
Her story, suppressed by her family until her journal was published in 1968, was memorably dramatised seven years later in L'Histoire de Adèle H, a film directed by François Truffaut with Isabella Adjani in the title-role; but Bostridge has dug deeper into the evidence than they did, weaving episodes of his own emotional life into hers and producing something of haunting beauty and stylistic grace.
Brought up in the shadow of her father's enormous fame and his grieving over the drowning of her sister Leopoldine, Adèle was never happy. In photographs, she often has a melancholy expression; in character she was pallid and withdrawn, even sullen. Her one modest talent was for genteel musical composition and playing the piano remained her lifelong consolation. Otherwise she was confined to the family circle, where she was assigned the dreary task of recording her father's incessant and verbose table talk.
When Hugo was exiled from France to the Channel Islands in the wake of his opposition to the authoritarian régime of Louis Napoleon, she dutifully followed, and it was in St Helier that in 1852 she encountered the unremarkable Albert Pinson, something of a dandy and "lover of the turf". Their relationship, such as it was, blossomed when he pressed his leg against hers round the table at which Hugo held séances; Pinson kissed her, maybe more -- we just don't know -- and he might well have initially felt warmly towards her. Adèle was certainly considered attractive; she was described by Balzac as the greatest beauty he had ever seen. But Pinson soon began a long process of slithering away from her clutches, joining the army as a volunteer as she turned into his relentless stalker.
At one point in 1861, he seems to have been on the verge of surrender -- Bostridge finds a licence issued for a marriage that never took place. Adèle pretended that it did. Presenting herself as "Madame Pinson", she abandoned her family and secretly followed her prey across the Atlantic to his garrison in Nova Scotia, shadowing his every move, always dressed in black, the victim of a compulsion chillingly described by Bostridge as "similar to the grip of paralysis, as if one were literally dragging heavy chains along the street".
Hugo sent her an allowance and seemed resigned to losing her. "She alone can save herself and she does not want to," he shrugged, more concerned about avoiding scandal than her well-being. From Nova Scotia, she pursued Pinson to Barbados. In 1869 he returned to Britain and married someone else, leaving Adèle physically and mentally broken. A kindly Caribbean nurse accompanied her back to Paris when Hugo returned to France following the fall of Louis Napoleon. Her story effectively ends there: at the age of 42, she was sectioned. Hugo called her a "naufrage", a shipwreck. She died in 1915, at the age of 85, hugely wealthy through her father's royalties, not downright mad but very fragile, having lived over half her life in sanatoria.
Following a model made fashionable by Richard Holmes in Footsteps (1985), Bostridge makes himself and his adventures as a researcher part of the narrative, tracking the houses and landscapes variously inhabited by Adèle. Through several of the fortuitous discoveries and coincidences that bless luckier literary foragers, he manages to uncover far more about Albert Pinson than was previously known and feels inclined to exonerate him. Points in Adèle's history resonate with Bostridge's own: the death of his baby half-sister, the obnoxious behaviour of his unstable womanising father, sexual infatuations that led to nothing but psychotherapy, and the more recent nervous collapse of his partner are all incorporated into the narrative. This could be tiresome, but Bostridge handles delicate material tactfully and without self-pity. The result is a book full of pain and sadness, but one that is a melancholy pleasure to read.
Rupert Christiansen's books include Tales of the New Babylon: Paris, 1869-75. In Pursuit of Love is published by Bloomsbury at £20. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
CAPTION(S):
Credit: Everett Collection
Bruce Robinson and Isabelle Adjani in L'Histoire de Adèle H, directed by François Truffaut
Credit: Alamy
Balzac described Adèle Hugo as the greatest beauty he had ever seen
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"How Victor Hugo's daughter stalked an unlucky British soldier across the Atlantic; Mark Bostridge's innovative biography of Adèle Hugo, In Pursuit of Love, is a haunting account of a life in the shadow of her father's fame." Telegraph Online, 24 May 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795219665/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e3393afb. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.