Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens

“Briefly, A Delicious Life” takes its title from a quote by Chopin in which the composer touts the deliciousness of a summer haven of turquoise skies, azure seas, and emerald mountains. Gaskell” and Me in the UK, she juxtaposed her struggles with a doctoral dissertation on Victorian literature with two thwarted love stories set more than 150 years apart.

In “The Victorian and the Romantic,” which was published as “Mrs.

In Bleaker House, Stevens wrote about her failed attempt to write a novel even after sequestering herself from all distractions on the aptly-named, inhospitable Bleaker Island in the Falklands, where she spent six uncomfortable, weather-lashed weeks. Blanca's clairvoyance enables Stevens to open up her novel with flashbacks and multiple points of view that would otherwise be beyond her long-dead narrator's purview.īlanca, ever the mischievous teenager, tells us, 'When I rummaged through people's memories, I looked for two things: formative experiences and rude bits.' She is particularly keen on sex, and enjoys recalling the beachside trysts with a young novice from the monastery which led to the end of her happy childhood.Īlthough this is Stevens' first foray into fiction, its genre-bending plot combines elements of her two prior books, both memoirs with nods to 19th century literature. This is how she - and readers - learn of Sand's early, unhappy marriage to Casimir Dudevant and of her sexually liberated life as a popular Parisian author. She has also discovered a welcome diversion: the ability to enter into people's heads to gain access to their feelings and memories. Of course, Sand, née Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, can neither see nor hear her, but Blanca has over the centuries developed ways of getting attention, such as by knocking over scalding beverages. Lacking other options, they take up residency in the dank, abandoned monastery.įrom the moment Blanca first sees the unconventional, cigar-smoking, trouser-clad writer, she's smitten. She has remained there ever since, deliberately haunting generations of monks and sacristans in retaliation for her premature demise.īlanca's tale focuses on how her after-death existence is dramatically changed when French writer George Sand and her tubercular lover, composer Frederic Chopin, arrive from Paris in 1838 with Sand's two children and her unhappy maid to spend the winter in Valldemossa - foolishly hoping to find sunshine and warmth to cure the ailing composer. The novel's narrator, Blanca, is the perspicacious ghost of a 14-year-old girl who died in a Carthusian monastery on the island of Mallorca in 1473. Nell Stevens' debut novel “Briefly, A Delicious Life” is a curious mashup of historical fiction, a ghost story, and a queer love story.

Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens