The Content Reader

The Classic Club : Tell us about the classic book(s) you’re reading this month. For the February Brontë Reading Group ’s meeting, I have read Trilby by George du Maurier. Our meeting will be on Monday 29th so we have not yet discussed the book. I am sure it will be a lively and interesting discussion. Here are a few of my thoughts. Trilby was one of the most popular novels of its time. Like so many of the novels in those days it started as a serial in 1894 and was published in book form in 1895.  It starts out in a bohemian quarter of Paris in the 1850s, where we meet two English and one Scottish artist, Trilby, half-Irish, working as an artist’s model and laundress and Svengali, a Jewish rogue, masterful musician and hypnotist. They are all in love with the lovely Trilby. The novel, it seems, is mainly about ’milieu’, which is a description of the social context where people are dwelling. I can agree; that is really what this novel is all about, and unfortunately a story is ...