The Constant Nymph

"The Constant Nymph" is author and playwright Margaret Kennedy's best known work. Written in the early 1920s, this novel may seem a bit dated in its language and cultural references to modern readers, but it is absorbing and shrewdly observed, with well-drawn characters who will remain with the reader after they close the book. The novel was considered somewhat shocking at the time it was published for describing romantic/sexual attachments on the part of what, at the time, were considered young children, and delivers some passionate observations on the conflict between art and "civilization" through its characters. The novel focuses on the Sanger family, headed up by Albert Sanger, a womanizing, self-involved English composer of some note, who has secluded himself and his family of undisciplined children in a chalet in the Austrian Tyrol. The children are from two different marriages and one liaison, and show varying degrees of their father's artistic brilliance as well as his contempt for societal norms. The household is propped up by the two eldest children, Caryl and Kate, who are already young adults and the most stable of the menagerie. The middle four children are the product of Sanger's second marriage to Evelyn Churchill, an Englishwoman of good family who cut herself off from her family to marry him, while the youngest is the product of Sanger's liaison with his current mistress (both wives are dead). The novel opens with the almost immediate death of the seriously ill Sanger, leaving four of his five younger children parentless. The youngest child disappears from the story very soon with her mother, as do the two eldest children, who have careers of their own to follow, one as an operatic soprano and the other as a conductor. It is the fate of Evelyn Churchill's four children, ranging in age from ten to sixteen, around which the novel revolves. Their closest relatives turn out to be their uncle, the dead Evelyn's brother, Charles, and his adult daughter, Florence, their cousin. Charles, the headmaster of a highly regarded private boys' school, is notified of the now parentless state of his sister's children. Charles sends the 28-year-old Florence to the Tyrol to take charge of her unruly young cousins. Her intention is to bring them back to England with her and place them in proper boarding schools where they can acquire discipline and basic education, and become suitably civilized. As soon as she arrives, Florence sees that she has her work cut out for her. The eldest, Antonia, sixteen years old, has recently been seduced by a rich friend of Sanger's, Jacob Birnbaum, who has fallen deeply in love with the beautiful young girl and offers to marry her. At first doubtful of this plan, Florence realizes that at 16, placing Antonia in a boarding school is unlikely to prove successful, especially given Antonia's state of newly awakened sexuality, and Florence agrees that the marriage is perhaps the best solution for Antonia. Th

What a discovery, this book by a British author little known in the US. Margaret Kennedy creates the atmosphere of a creative rather mad household in vivid detail. We love the Sanger children, not quite certain at the beginning who is our heroine from the way we are brought into their Alpine retreat. The omniscient point of view gives us insights on even the characters who are relatively stereotyped by today's sensibilities: the Russian ballet designer, the wealthy Jewish family friend. Kennedy's broad sympathies and wisdom on love and the relation of the sexes make this much more than a period romance or 'woman's book,', and her depiction of musical genius vs bourgeois society is complex. Read Anita Brookner's introduction afterwards--you want 'The Constant Nymph' to unfold with no preconceptions.