Jenny Diski's new novel is based on the passionate and complex character of Marie de Goumay, the young woman who, overwhelmingly excited by teh work of French essayist and philosopher Michel de Montaigne (on first reading she had to be revived with hellebore), determined to meet him. When she finally did, she stabbed herself with a hairpin until the blood ran in order to show her devotion.
Montaigne's ambivalent response to this strange and passionate young acolyte was to make Marie his fille de'alliance, his adopted daughter. When he died four years later, she became the editor and champion of his work, though scorned by intellectuals, and - impossible for an uneducated woman - a professional writer herself.
An awkward, obsessive character, she set herself against the world in her determination to achieve her ambitions. Only her servant, Jamyn, really knew her.
Jenny Diski engages with this remarkable trianble of relationships between 'father and daughter', writer and acolyte, mistress and servant, lovers - and the anguish of absence they all endure - to create an extraordinary and strangely contemporary tale of obsession and disappointment.
* From the award-winning author of STRANGER ON A TRAIN and SKATING TO ANTARTICA, a extraordinary novel based on a real story
