Lucile

A letter arrives, and a man's carefully constructed life begins to unravel. Lord Alfred Vargrave is days away from marrying the sensible Miss Darcy when he hears from Lucile de Nevers, the woman he once loved and left. What follows is a meditation on desire and obligation, memory and reality. Through graceful anapaestic verse, Bulwer-Lytton maps the terrain of a heart at war with itself. Alfred's irreverent cousin John serves as a foil, urging him toward respectability while Alfred drowns in what-ifs. The poem doesn't offer easy answers. Instead, it sits in the uncomfortable space between who we are and who we thought we'd be, between the passion of youth and the compromises of maturity. It was the defining sensation of Victorian England, selling over two thousand editions in the century after its publication. For readers who believe the past is never really past, who understand that some letters should never be opened.