![]() ![]() She is not marrying for love - the match represents, for this modest country girl, the best hope of comfort and material security - but she dares to hope that a fondness might arise in time. Petronella has moved to Amsterdam from the provincial town of Assendelft, aged eighteen, to be the wife of Johannes Brandt, a wealthy merchant. What goes for early 20th-century England is all the more pertinent for 17th-century Netherlands, the setting for Jessie Burton’s compelling debut novel, The Miniaturist - which, like Chance, tells of a young woman rudely imposed upon by calamity. Her only means of action is to be what she is.’ Thus mused Joseph Conrad’s narrator in Chance (1914) on the predicament of his hapless protagonist, Flora de Barral. ‘A woman against the world has no resources but in herself. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |