Every Eye

by Isobel English

Book Overview

"Exquisite."--The New Yorker

Isobel English, a novelist of the 1950s, wrote three brief books about adultery and damnation. Every Eye concerns Hattie, a woman not really at home anywhere, least of all among her manipulative family, which has assigned her the role of shabby-genteel London spinster. She has understood little about her existence, and about her strange, aborted love affair with a much older man--the...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1574231995
• ISBN13: 9781574231991
• Release Date: July 2006
• Publisher: Black Sparrow Press
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 6.8"

Customer Reviews

Another remarkable rediscovery from Persephone

The editors at persephone Books in London have done a tremendous service by reissuing these terrific and beautiful editions of neglected twentieth-century women's classics; it's a true shame these books aren't more available in the United States in affordable editions. EVERY EYE is one of the most beautifully written books in their series; Isobel English's gift for narrative description (particularly for landscape and for fabrics) is superb. The story initially seems to be out of Caroline Blackwood territory, with its heroine's repeating complaints about the maternal figures in her life (particularly her aunt); but as the novel unfolds it moves far beyond that, and its deft shuttlings back between the heroine's present (her honeymoon in Ibiza) and her past seem miraculous. Cinema is one of the places where we are best used to such shifts, but there's little filmic in English's technique--her talents are thoroughly those of the novelistic. The gorgeousness of the prose and narrative drive allow you to overlook the conventionality of the very guessable "surprise ending."