Broken Music

Phyllis Bottome's 1914 novel opens on a quiet country dispute that carries the weight of one young man's entire future. Jean D'Ucelles has been raised by his English aunt, Miss Prenderghast, in the shadow of his parents' tragic legacy, and now stands at the threshold between the world that shaped him and the world he hungers to enter. His guardians see discipline and duty; Jean hears only the music calling him to Paris. The local Curé and his doctor debate the boy's fate as if he were terrain to be claimed, while Jean himself remains strangely absent from conversations about his own life. When he finally breaks toward the city and its possibilities, he encounters a world that rewards passion differently than his sheltered existence ever could. Bottome writes with sharp precision about the collision between inherited expectations and the self one must carve out alone. For anyone who has ever been told who to be before they were allowed to discover it themselves.