Sacred and Profane Love

Carlotta Peel is not your typical Edwardian heroine. She's a published author by twenty-two, sharp-tongued, unapologetically intellectual, and utterly convinced she understands love until she tumbles headlong into actually experiencing it. Written in vivid first person, this 1902 novel follows her circuitous romantic and spiritual education through an era when women were still expected to choose between brains and passion. Bennett gives us a heroine who worships at the altar of both reason and desire, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes in ways that mortify her profoundly. The title proves deliberately prophetic as Carlotta samples religious devotion, romantic idealism, and physical passion, searching for a synthesis her world insists is impossible. The prose is witty, psychologically precise, and occasionally devastating in its honesty about the particular agony of a woman who wants to think AND feel, to be both free and surrendered. This is a novel for anyone who has ever ached for incompatible things, rendered in sparkling, unsentimental prose that still feels startlingly modern a century later.