Cynthia: With an Introduction by Maurice Hewlett

At a café in Dieppe, two friends debate love and literature while the sea laps outside. Humphrey Kent has just published his first novel to modest acclaim, but fame hasn't paid the rent yet, and now he's fallen desperately in love with the enchanting Cynthia Walford. The problem: she's wealthy, she's independent, and she's not easily won. What follows is a sharply observed comedy of manners about a writer navigating the gap between artistic ambition and financial reality, between the woman he loves and the life he might actually deserve. Leonard Merrick writes with acid wit and genuine tenderness about the way we convince ourselves our romantic failures are noble, and how love matures, or doesn't, into something harder to name.