‘Brilliant portraiture … the clash between two incompatible worlds. Kennedy finds herself well to the front among novelists.’ – New York Times
‘The Constant Nymph is startlingly modern in its outlook, the bohemian world it conjures being in many ways more progressive than the society we find ourselves inhabiting almost a century later … This is a strange, wonderful and unforgettable novel. As a study of human nature, The Constant Nymph is ageless.’ – Joanna Briscoe
Teresa is the daughter of a brilliant avant-garde composer composer, Albert Sanger, who with his ‘circus’ of precocious children, slatternly mistress and assorted hangers-on, lives in a ramshackle chalet in the Swiss Alps. The family and their home life may be chaotic, but visitors fall into an enchantment, and the claims of respectable life or upbringing fall away.
‘Unbalanced, untaught and fatally warm-hearted’, at fourteen Teresa has already fallen deeply in love with Lewis Dodd, a gifted composer like her father. Confidently she awaits maturity – and Lewis – but this longed-for destiny is shattered when her father dies suddenly and Lewis is drawn away by Teresa’s beautiful cousin Florence. However, neither his marriage nor Teresa’s exile to an English boarding school can break the spell the gods have placed on Lewis and his constant nymph. But for her, the outside world holds nothing but tragedy.
When The Constant Nymph was published in 1924, its author, Margaret Kennedy, achieved what most novelists dream of: literary acclaim followed by huge commercial success – on both sides of the Atlantic. It was a bestseller that earned praise from, among many others, JM Barrie, John Galsworthy, AA Milne, Cyril Connolly, and Thomas Hardy. It is a clever, poetic novel, emotionally shrewd and sardonically observant, dealing elegantly with grand themes and contrasts: love and lust, beauty and cruelty, jealousy and trust, art versus ‘culture’, security versus freedom.
‘It completely changed my life because it showed me a world that I became obsessed by – the world of Bohemia.’ – Alexandra Pringle
‘It’s a novel about ideas … as well as the sort of delicious and merciless emotions that can make people exuberant or desperate’ – The Atlantic
‘One foresees Nabokov [in] Margaret Kennedy’s ‘outrageous’ bestseller of 1925.’ – Washington Post
‘Brilliant portraiture … the clash between two incompatible worlds. Kennedy finds herself well to the front among novelists.’ – New York Times
‘Utterly fascinating … a singularly beautiful experience ‘ – The New York Times
‘Kennedy is not only a romantic but an anarchist, and she knows the ways of men and women very well indeed’ – Anita Brookner
‘The Constant Nymph is startlingly modern in its outlook, the bohemian world it conjures being in many ways more progressive than the society we find ourselves inhabiting almost a century later … This is a strange, wonderful and unforgettable novel. As a study of human nature, The Constant Nymph is ageless.’ – Joanna Briscoe
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Margaret Kennedy (1896-1967) was one of the most successful and prolific British novelists of the twentieth century. Her first novel, The Ladies of Lyndon, was published in 1923. Her second novel, The Constant Nymph, became an international bestseller – it sold copies in the millions and spawned no fewer than three screen adaptations. She also produced literary criticism, plays, screenplays, and a biography of Jane Austen. Margaret Kennedy died in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, in 1967.
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