A man of letters falls in love with a widow named Sixtine Magne, and the entire romance unfolds inside his skull. This is passion reconceived as intellectual exercise: Hubert d'Entragues constructs and deconstructs his desire through baroque reflections, lyrical exaltations, and sullen despondency, chasing an enigmatic woman who exists more as an idea than a presence. Set in the dying light of the 1890s, the novel follows these two figures through conversations beneath ancient fir trees and into the labyrinth of the mind, where desire becomes indistinguishable from literature itself. Gourmont's luxurious, erudite prose drifts between irony and eroticism, building stories within stories that mirror the inner experience of their author. Very Woman asks what remains when love is stripped of physicality entirely: only the beautiful, torturing architecture of the imagination. For readers who believe the most profound dramas occur between the ears.
