The Making of a Soul

Owen Rose, editor of a new London review, comes home from a year abroad to hear that his fiancée married Lord Saxonby that morning. Still smarting, he proposes to his office typist: Antonia Gibbs, eighteen, half Italian, orphaned, raised by relatives in Brixton and quite unready for life as a gentleman’s wife. Neither knows the other at all. Rhodes follows the match from the offices of The Bridge to Greenriver, Owen’s boyhood house on the river, where Toni is patronised by the county, reads hard to catch up with her husband’s world, and at last bolts from it altogether. The 1914 novel is unusually patient with both halves of a bad marriage instead of blaming the girl. Rhodes is remembered for her desert romances, so this quiet English study of class and loneliness shows a side few readers meet.