Isobel English

Hardcover, 192 pages ISBN: 1-57423-199-5 $23.95 Every Eye a novel by Isobel English with a memoir of the author by Neville Braybrooke “The late Isobel English was an exceptionally talented young novelist of the mid-1950s. Every Eye is one of her most successful and sensitively written books, a romantic yet unsentimental story of a young woman’s intricate relationships of family and love, intensely evocative of the period, remarkable in its observations of place and character.” – Muriel Spark Hattie, the middle-aged narrator of this brilliant, elliptical novel, is “a stranger by birth” and not really at home anywhere, least of all among her family. It is her family who, when she was a girl, made her feel awkward in every walk of life – even at the piano, for which she had a real gift – and who reconciled her, long before her time, to the life of a shabby-genteel West London spinster. She has understood very little of her own existence – a life seen, literally and metaphorically, through a squint. She remembers, with difficulty and confusion, her strange, aborted First love to a much older man; it is the central mystery of her life. Now, while in Ibiza with the carefree, younger man who has just become her husband, the meaning of her past is becoming clear, its hidden pattern emerging from gray English shadows into the yellow Mediterranean sun. “It is here, in Ibiza, that the novel breaks free of its resentments,” wrote Anita Brookner in praise of this too-long forgotten novel. Every Eye, she said, is not only “a lucidly written account of various kinds of confusion,” but “a valuable lesson in where to look for freedom.” “Sometimes, but not often, a novel comes along that makes the rest of what one has to review seem commonplace. Such a novel is Every Eye. It is remarkable for the skill of its construction, and for the style of its writing.” – John Betjeman