The Life and Death of Harriett Frean

'Well, I'm glad my little girl didn't snatch and push. It's better to go without than to take from other people. That's ugly.' Harriett is the Victorian embodiment of all the virtues then viewed as essential to the womanly ideal: a woman reared to love, honour and obey. Idolising her parents, she learns from childhood to equate love with self-sacrifice, so that when she falls in love with the fiance of her closest friend, renunciation of this unworthy passion initially brings her a peculiar sort of happiness. But the passing of time reveals a different truth. Ironic, brief and intensely realised, The Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922) is a brilliant study of female virtue seen as vice, and stands with the work of Virgina Woolf and Dorothy Richardson as one of the great innovative novels of the century.

ISBN 0860681068   DEWEY edition DC21 ISBN13 9780860681069 (What's this?)   Pages 176 Publisher Little, Brown Book Group   Weight (grammes) 145 Imprint Virago Press Ltd   Published in London Format Paperback   Series ISSN 0261-994 Publication date 14 Apr 1980   Series title Virago Modern Classics Reissue date 28 Nov 2003   Height (mm) 192 Writer of introduction Jean Radford   Width (mm) 126 DEWEY 823.912   Academic level General

'Exceptionally modern in flavour and shocking in intensity' COSMOPOLITAN 'A little masterpiece, a disturbing analysis of English class and character' NEW STATESMAN Hermione Lee in the TLS: 'When the histories of modernism are rewritten, no one will be able to ignore May Sinclair again'

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