Beauty Without Talent
From school with strict cheerless nuns to university, where I came under the severe hand of my tutor, I identified with the eponymous Trilby the moment I opened the pages of George du Maurier's novel of domination and submission, a book with an undercurrent of eroticism that can

It happened the other day, while I was reading George du Maurier's Trilby, that a young man asked me whether I read mainly fiction or non-fiction - his preference clearly being for the latter. I answered the former, and had to supress within me a slight sense of shame. Does the fiction reader not, a

One day after a long session shelf-diving on Goodreads, I came upon the title of Trilby by DuMaurier. I was pleased to discover my local library had a copy, and placed it on hold. Over a year later, I received notice that it had come in. It was a first edition in the original, now torn, binding and

An unusual fairly anti-Semitic melodrama about the lives of several expatriates in bohemian Paris. The second half tells what becomes of them, including the beautiful young model, Trilby, who becomes a singing sensation under the tutelage of the mysterious Svengali. My favorite parts centered on the

Trilby is highly sentimental, in the worst tradition of late-19th century British fiction, and were it not set in Paris and London, I might be tempted to think of it as kailyard. Svengali and Trilby and several other characters are memorable, but they’re not enough to rescue the novel from bathos. A