Thalia by Faviell, Frances [Paperback]

Description: 'You are a virgin?' 'Yes.' 'How dull! What's the use of being a woman if you're a virgin?' 'One has to begin sometime,' I agreed. Recovering from an illness, Rachel, an 18-year-old art student at the Slade in London, is advised to spend a year in a warm climate. She agrees to go to France to act as companion to Cynthia, a delicate, temperamental woman whose husband is in India, and her two children, troubled 15-year-old Thalia and spoiled young Claude. Thalia quickly becomes devoted to Rachel, but their friendship is strained by Rachel's romance with the son of a well-to-do Breton family. Though it's the awkward, emotional Thalia who lends the novel its title, it's Rachel on whom the novel centers, poignantly telling the tale of her sad first love, her dawning awareness of the vagaries and dishonesties of social life, and the tragedy she is powerless to prevent. Set in Brittany in the mid-1930s, with an excursion to the cafés and artists' studios of Montparnasse, Thalia is a dramatic and poignant tale by the author of A Chelsea Concerto. It includes an afterword by the author's son, John Parker, and other supplementary material. 'Mrs. Faviell … writes with grace and sensibility; this young, new world of first experiences is brought back and set down with a fresh touch, and, while shadowed by tragedy, it is eminently pleasant to follow.' Kirkus Reviews 'She writes with a sharpness of outline which would not shame Simenon.' J.W. Lambert, Sunday Times Frances Faviell (1905-1959) was the pen name of Olivia Faviell Lucas, painter and author. She studied at the Slade School of Art in London under the aegis of Leon Underwood. In 1930 she married a Hungarian academic and travelled with him to India where she lived for some time at the ashram of Rabindranath Tagore, and visiting Nagaland. She then lived in Japan and China until having to flee from Shanghai during the Japanese invasion. She met her second husband Richard Parker in 1939 and married him in 1940. She became a Red Cross volunteer in Chelsea during the Phoney War. Due to its proximity to the Royal Hospital and major bridges over the Thames Chelsea was one of the most heavily bombed areas of London. She and other members of the Chelsea artists' community were often in the heart of the action, witnessing or involved in fascinating and horrific events throughout the Blitz. Her experiences of the time were later recounted in the memoir A Chelsea Concerto (1959). After the war, in 1946, she went with her son, John, to Berlin where Richard had been posted as a senior civil servant in the post-war British Administration (the CCG). It was here that she befriended the Altmann Family which prompted her first book The Dancing Bear (1954), a memoir of the Occupation seen through the eyes of both occupier and occupied. She later wrote three novels, A House on the Rhine (1955), Thalia (1957), and The Fledgeling (1958). These are now all available as Furrowed Middlebrow books.

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End Time: 2025-02-07T19:44:04.000Z

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