A Beautiful Alien

Julia Magruder's turn-of-the-century novel follows Christine Dallas, an Italian woman raised in a convent, who marries a quiet American after a hurried courtship at a European resort and sails with him to a home where she knows no one. Her husband speaks only English; her own is halting and heavily accented, so the marriage settles into silence rather than companionship. Albert Noel, a lawyer with an artist's eye who first notices her aboard the steamer from Europe, becomes the friend who watches her loneliness harden as the couple sinks into poverty and her infant falls dangerously ill. The alien of the title is a foreigner, not a visitor from another world. Magruder writes a restrained study of a woman worn thin by an ill-matched marriage and a country she cannot speak to.

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