Fair Margaret

Margaret Donne is an English girl with a fine voice and a plan: to train in earnest and make her name on the operatic stage. Crawford follows her from lessons and rehearsals to a nervous debut as Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust, staged in a Belgian city, while two very different men press their suit. One is Edmund Lushington, a reserved and scrupulous young writer; the other is Constantine Logotheti, a Greek financier settled in Paris who courts her with worldly confidence. First published in 1905 as the opening book of the trilogy continued in The Primadonna, it studies ambition and self-possession as much as romance. Crawford writes the world of singers, critics, and drawing rooms with an insider’s ear, and Margaret herself is drawn as thoughtful, willful, and refreshingly her own woman.