Carnival

by Compton Mackenzie

Overview

The moving romance of dancer Jenny Pearl: a story which helped establish Mackenzie among the foremost novelists of his generation

Jenny Pearl, a dancer, falls in love with Maurice Avery, a young dilettante who leaves her when she refuses to become his mistress. Despairingly, she falls into a loveless marriage with Trewhella, a Cornish farmer who becomes insanely jealous when Avery reappears on the scene. Vivid, moving, and ultimately tragic, this book was first published in 1912 to wide critical acclaim, helping to establish Mackenzie as one of the foremost British novelists of his generation. It has since been filmed three times and adapted for the stage and as an opera.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781848547704
Publisher:	Hodder
Publication date:	05/07/2013
Edition description:	Canadian Edition
Pages:	528
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.20(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Compton Mackenzie (1833-1972) was a writer and Scottish nationalist who published almost 100 books across a range of different genres, including fiction, history, biography, literary criticism, satire, children's stories, and poetry. He is perhaps best known for two comedies set in Scotland, The Monarch of the Glen and Whisky Galore.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter III: Dawn Shadows JENNY reached the age of two years and a few months without surprising her relatives by any prodigious feats of intelligence or wickedness. But in Hagworth Street there was not much leisure to regard the progress of babyhood. There was no time for more than physical comparisons with other children. It would be pleasant to pretend that Jenny gazed at the stars, dapping a welcome to Cassiopea and singing to the Pleiades; but, as a matter of fact, it was not very easy to regard the heavens from the kitchen window of Number Seventeen. I should be happy to say that flowers were a joy to her from the beginning, but very few flowers came to Hagworth Street—groundsel for the canary sometimes, and plantains, but not much else. The main interest of Jenny's earliest days lay rather with her mother than herself. The visit of the three old aunts roused Mrs. Raeburn to express her imagination at first, but gradually assumed a com' monplace character as the months rolled by without anothei visit and as Jenny, with a chair pushed before her, learned to walk rather earlier than most children, but showed no other sign of suffering or benefiting by that grim intervention. Perhaps, when she pushed her wooden guide so quickly alonjj the landing that chair and child bumped together down everj stair, her mother was inclined to think she was lucky not tQ be killed. Anyway, she said,so to the child, who was shrieking on the mat in the hall; and in after years Jenny couldremember the painful incident. Indeed, that and a backward splash into the washtub on the first occasion of wearing a frock of damson velveteen, were the only events of her earliest life that impressedthemselves at all sharply or completely upon her mind. Through time's distorted haze she could also vaguely...