The Constant Nymph (Virago Modern Classics) [Paperback]

"The Constant Nymph" is author and playwright Margaret Kennedy's best known work. Written in the early 1920s, this novel may seem a bit dated in its language and cultural references to modern readers, but it is absorbing and shrewdly observed, with well-drawn characters who will remain with the reader after they close the book. The novel was considered somewhat shocking at the time it was published for describing romantic/sexual attachments on the part of what, at the time, were considered young children, and delivers some passionate observations on the conflict between art and "civilization" through its characters.

The novel focuses on the Sanger family, headed up by Albert Sanger, a womanizing, self-involved English composer of some note, who has secluded himself and his family of undisciplined children in a chalet in the Austrian Tyrol. The children are from two different marriages and one liaison, and show varying degrees of their father's artistic brilliance as well as his contempt for societal norms. The household is propped up by the two eldest children, Caryl and Kate, who are already young adults and the most stable of the menagerie. The middle four children are the product of Sanger's second marriage to Evelyn Churchill, an Englishwoman of good family who cut herself off from her family to marry him, while the youngest is the product of Sanger's liaison with his current mistress (both wives are dead).

The novel opens with the almost immediate death of the seriously ill Sanger, leaving four of his five younger children parentless. The youngest child disappears from the story very soon with her mother, as do the two eldest children, who have careers of their own to follow, one as an operatic soprano and the other as a conductor.

It is the fate of Evelyn Churchill's four children, ranging in age from ten to sixteen, around which the novel revolves. Their closest relatives turn out to be their uncle, the dead Evelyn's brother, Charles, and his adult daughter, Florence, their cousin. Charles, the headmaster of a highly regarded private boys' school, is notified of the now parentless state of his sister's children.

Charles sends the 28-year-old Florence to the Tyrol to take charge of her unruly young cousins. Her intention is to bring them back to England with her and place them in proper boarding schools where they can acquire discipline and basic education, and become suitably civilized. As soon as she arrives, Florence sees that she has her work cut out for her. The eldest, Antonia, sixteen years old, has recently been seduced by a rich friend of Sanger's, Jacob Birnbaum, who has fallen deeply in love with the beautiful young girl and offers to marry her. At first doubtful of this plan, Florence realizes that at 16, placing Antonia in a boarding school is unlikely to prove successful, especially given Antonia's state of newly awakened sexuality, and Florence agrees that the marriage is perhaps the best solution for Antonia. That leaves Teresa, or Tessa as she is called (14), Pauline (12), and Sebastian (10). Pauline evidences serious dramatic talent, and Sebastian is a gifted pianist - it is clear that these two children, at least, already have some direction that can guide their futures. Only Tessa shows no particular sign of the family heritage of quirky brilliance - artistically, at least.

Rounding out the bizarre household that Florence finds when she gets to the Tyrol is Sanger's best friend, the rebellious, charismatic, and gifted young English composer Lewis Dodd, who, like the children's dead mother, is from a fine English family from whom he has cut himself off, and whose hypocrisies and pretensions he despises. Young Tessa has loved Lewis with all her heart since she was a little girl; she feels as if she belongs to him, and her portion of the family gift is an unnatural openness and clarity of mind - she understands Lewis completely and has known from a terrifyingly young age that they belong together. Already, at 14, she knows how to handle him and sustain him in a way that is quite startling in so young a girl. Her strange maturity where he is concerned, their perfect complementariness, is something that so far, her young age has kept Lewis blind to, although her sisters and brother, with the offhanded intuition of children, are aware of it. It is this aspect of the novel, Tessa's passionate devotion to Lewis at so young an age, that shocked readers of the 1920s - the novel makes no bones about the fact that the young Tessa loves the thirty-year-old Lewis the way an adult woman loves a man. The novel does not, to its credit, condescend to Tessa's love for Lewis, or pass it off as a "phase" or "crush", but presents it as real and deep: Tessa is not the victim of a schoolgirl crush, but a girl who has seen her heart's destiny too early.

To Tessa's dismay, Florence and Lewis fall immediately in love and get themselves quickly married. Tessa's dismay is part personal anguish but part dread: she knows that Florence has fallen in love with Lewis's surface, that Florence has no knowledge of Lewis's darker nature and his capacity for cruelty. After their honeymoon, Lewis moves with Florence to England, where Florence buys a house. Tessa and Pauline are sent to a boarding school with other nice English schoolgirls where they are miserable. Sebastian does better at his school because of his wit, detached nature, and undeniable musical gifts, but none of the Sanger children are happy as they move from their unfettered past to what Florence cheerfully calls "the shades of the prison house".

Florence believes herself to be sophisticated and tolerant, and she is quite knowledgeable about music. But, although initially charmed by her histrionic cousins, the conflict between her fundamentally conformist views and their freewheeling natures, which reverence nothing but music, soon begins to take a toll on the relationships among the characters - especially between Florence and Lewis. Florence begins to try to "manage" Lewis's career and push it forward using her contacts in English music circles, deaf to his passionate insistence that he doesn't give a damn whether anyone hears his music or not, and to his increasing hostility as she tries to force him to embrace the very Establishment values of "success" that he fled at sixteen when he left home. As their polarized views of life and art emerge, the marriage begins to fray. These tensions escalate when Tessa and Pauline, unable to cope any longer with the mob rule that characterizes English boarding school life and that is so contrary to their individualistic upbringing, run away and arrive on the Dodd's doorstep, to Lewis's approval and Florence's fury. Florence wants to send them back, but the school will not take the Sanger sisters back, they are too disruptive. Pauline is quickly shipped off to a dramatic academy in France, but Tessa has nowhere to go and finds herself between Florence and Lewis in their home, a position that becomes ever more dangerous as the Dodd marriage deteriorates. Florence, sensing Lewis's partiality for Tessa, increasingly resents her young cousin's presence, although she still does not grasp the depth of their attachment.

It is Charles, Florence's father, who first recognizes the true nature of the profound bond between Lewis and Tessa, and the looming disaster that will occur the moment Lewis himself becomes fully aware of it. Charles tries to warn Florence to be less vicious toward her cousin and less domineering toward her husband, behaviors that are driving Lewis away. Charles even offers to educate Tessa privately in his own household - he likes Tessa enormously, enchanted by her unusually broad and perceptive mind. Charles believes that if he can get Tessa out of the Dodd household, he can save her from an early involvement with Lewis that will blight her young life, and give Florence a chance to salvage her marriage.

But it is too late - the novel is already building to its inevitable confrontations between the unbidden nature of art and love and the artificial boundaries of civilization. Florence's doom is that she is both the invader and the victim of the little world whose Bohemian character once so charmed her; she has wandered, unwary, into an environment that is hostile to her essential ideas of order and morality. Despite her beauty, sophistication, and good intentions, Florence remains an outsider in this world, which she despises while longing for true membership in it. She hates and envies her cousins for their natural citizenship in this world. Tessa and Lewis, on their parts, realize at last not only that they belong to each other, but that they do not belong in Florence's neatly ordered universe. No compromise is possible here, only tragedy.

This beautifully written novel explores uncomfortable truths about the nature of love and genius. I stumbled upon it first as a young girl and have revisited it since with admiration as well as pleasure. It is, as mentioned earlier, acutely observed, and if you like English literature and the early 20th-century English "voice", you will likely adore this stylishly presented work. I'm delighted to see that it is available in print again.

What a discovery, this book by a British author little known in the US. Margaret Kennedy creates the atmosphere of a creative rather mad household in vivid detail. We love the Sanger children, not quite certain at the beginning who is our heroine from the way we are brought into their Alpine retreat. The omniscient point of view gives us insights on even the characters who are relatively stereotyped by today's sensibilities: the Russian ballet designer, the wealthy Jewish family friend. Kennedy's broad sympathies and wisdom on love and the relation of the sexes make this much more than a period romance or 'woman's book,', and her depiction of musical genius vs bourgeois society is complex. Read Anita Brookner's introduction afterwards--you want 'The Constant Nymph' to unfold with no preconceptions.