I am playing Art of the Novella Reading Challenge catch-up this weekend so there is no time to waste. Writing about a novella I did not enjoy. For which I would translate the description on the inner flap that reads "the narrator's emotional and relentlessly self-examining voice" to "the narrator's overly-emotional and relentlessly repetitive obsession with self without the benefit of any reflection of creditable self-knowledge." Just painful for me.
Parents have a great love. Wife dies in childbirth. Husband abandons child to an unfeeling aunt for sixteen years where she leads an isolated existence until her father suddenly reappears before aunt dies. Takes her away to London and country estate he shared with her mother. Ecstatically happy at first followed by unexplained rejection and melodramatic brooding by father. Reveals that he is sexually drawn to her. She becomes involved with handsome poet. Mess. Autobiographical implications. Didn't care. Immune to whatever gothic brilliance some feel contained here. Blech!
