Elizabeth Edmondson - The Art of Love

Review by Babs Simpson on show 15th April 2010
This is the story of Polly Smith, a struggling young artist in 1930 London. She scrapes a living from an unsatisfactory job "improving" old paintings and from designing book jackets but her own work has become more and more dull in colour and small in size.
She has grown up in a loving home and is now engaged to an eligible doctor but is slowly becoming aware that his idea of her life after their marriage is not all what she has in mind. He wants to take her climbing in Switzerland for their honeymoon - not for him the warmth, colour and sunshine of the south - and when Polly applies for a passport, she is bewildered to discover that she does not exist. There is no birth certificate for a Polly Smith. Unwillingly, she tackles her widowed mother on the subject and finds out that she is in fact Polyhymnia Wilkins, was born in Paris and is the illegitimate daughter of her mother's sister. She gets a shortened birth certificate and then a passport, but cannot bring herself to admit her illegitimacy to her fiance, who is just about to leave for America.
She is invited by a rich friend to spend Christmas and new year in the south of France where she meets the mysterious Max and his family. Dark secrets begin to be uncovered and Polly doesn't realise she is in danger.
This is a very satisfying story, very well written with all the varied characters most vividly drawn. there is a sense of time about it that rings completely true, the dinginess of a London winter between the wars, the frantic search for excitement and glamour and the luxury life of the very rich.
The style reminds me somewhat of Rosamund Lehmann or Elizabeth Taylor, both novelists whose work I have enjoyed enormously in the past and I am looking forward to discovering more of this authors books. This is her fourth book and I don't' know why her name isn't familiar. It certainly deserves to be.
A very satisfying, good read which I can thoroughly recommend.
review by Babs