The Little French Girl

Alix is twenty and already mourning. She has left the limestone hills of Montarel, the house where she was born, the France that lives in her blood, and crossed the Channel to England, where her mother has arranged for her to make a advantageous match. The English are kindly but impenetrable, with their fog and their understatement and their baffling comfort with silence. Alix, who was raised on French directness and the arts of charm, finds herself a foreigner in a land where even the light seems different. The novel follows her season in England: the careful rituals of courtship, the jokes that don't land, the moments when she glimpses something in an English face or landscape that speaks to a part of herself she didn't know existed. Sedgwick, writing in the 1920s, is delicious on the friction between the two nations, the Frenchwoman'sworldliness versus the Englishman's reserve, the question of what is gained and lost when a girl from one country becomes a wife in another. Alix must decide not just whom to marry, but who she is when home is no longer a place she can return to.