The Twelfth Hour

Set during a long, golden Edwardian summer, Ada Leverson's debut novel dissects the marriage market with scalpel precision. Felicity Crofton, married to the polo-obsessed Lord Chetwode, discovers that wedded bliss fades quickly when one's husband prefers horseflesh to domestic company. Her sister Sylvia faces a crueler arithmetic: a father eager to auction her to a Greek millionaire while she pines for a penniless secretary. Meanwhile, sixteen-year-old Savile, on holiday from Eton, toggles between the earnest attentions of a young Dolly Clive and a consuming passion for an opera singer observed from theater seats. Leverson, writing at the height of the Bloomsbury literary scene that would later embrace her, deploys wit like currency, exposing the brutal calculations beneath garden parties and ball gowns. This is a world where love must either be cunning or be crushed. The novel's mischievous humor and sharp social observation render its characters neither as innocents nor as villains, but as creatures doing bloody battle with their own hearts and their society's immutable rules. For readers who savor the comedies of E.M. Forster or the satires of Nancy Mitford, Leverson offers an earlier, equally sparkling specimen of English wit under pressure.