In Pursuit of Love
The Search for Victor Hugo's Daughter
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published:6th Jun '24
Should be back in stock very soon
From Normandy to the Caribbean Islands, this innovative biographical pursuit follows Adèle Hugo on her reckless journey of unrequited love – and the writer who chased after her more than 150 years later.
It’s 1863. The daughter of the most famous writer in the world, Victor Hugo, who has ambitions as a writer and composer, suddenly leaves her family’s home on the Channel Islands bound for Nova Scotia. She is in pursuit of a young British soldier, with whom she is desperately in love, but who has rejected her. Eight years later, after stalking him to the Caribbean, where he’s stationed with the army, Adèle Hugo is brought back to Paris by a benevolent former slave woman who has taken pity on her. She is admitted to an asylum where she dies decades later, rich from the inheritance of the rights to her father’s books.
This story of hopeless love has inspired writers, composers, and a well-known film by François Truffaut. Yet much about Adèle Hugo’s tragic life has remained shrouded in mystery – not least the true character and identity of the soldier who ultimately contributed to her undoing.
Mark Bostridge was drawn to Adèle’s story in his twenties, thanks in part to the François Truffaut film, and has been following her story ever since. Now he sets out in pursuit of the truth about her, travelling halfway across the world, acting as sleuth and tracking down the descendants of the soldier she loved. In so doing he recognises the source of his fascination with the aspects of Adèle’s life that reflect and parallel his own. The result is a moving book about the pain of loving too much and of parents loving too little; about the ways in which we are haunted by the dead; and about our insatiable appetite for other people’s stories which possess us and invade our own lives.
In Pursuit of Love is part memoir and part travelogue, as well as an invigorating new approach to the writing of biography.
Mark Bostridge’s innovative biography…weaving episodes of his own emotional life into hers and producing something of haunting beauty and stylistic grace...a book full of pain and sadness, but one that is a melancholy pleasure to read. * Daily Telegraph *
In this gloriously rich and capacious book, the biographer Mark Bostridge sets out to unravel the story of Adele, the promising girl who was born into republican France’s equivalent to a royal family yet spent most of her adult life being unravelled by love… What makes Bostridge’s offering so compelling is that much of his book is taken up with the process of writing a deeply researched non-fiction book. * The Sunday Times *
It’s the saddest story ever told - and told so beautifully that you wish it would never end. The author’s search for the truth about Victor Hugo’s daughter carries him across oceans and into the darkest corners of his own past. It’s an unforgettable journey. * Ferdinand Mount, author of Kiss Myself Goodbye *
A haunting and utterly engrossing book – not just a brilliant study of Adele Hugo’s obsessive and unrequited love, but full of revelations about the biographer himself, as he pursues the truth about her life, and finds in the process many parallel truths about his own. * Claire Harman, author of Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart *
Profound, shattering, and utterly immersive. * Frances Wilson, author of Burning Man: The Ascent of DH Lawrence *
This excavation of a buried woman – covered by the sands of time, hearsay, rumours that attach to celebrity, and her own misinformation – sifts the very practice of biography. As a strange story of an obsession comes to light, Bostridge questions our reliance on documentation and challenges the illusion of objectivity with the biographer’s own obsessiveness as he finds touching parallels in his own life that bring him closer to elusive truth. * Lyndall Gordon, author of The Hyacinth Girl: T. S. Eliot's Hidden Muse *
Bostridge elegantly and poignantly interweaves tales of amorous grief and mental illness. * The Spectator *
Why, Bostridge asks in this hypersensitive and utterly immersive book, are biographers drawn to certain stories? In what ways do the historical lives we explore reflect on our own unexamined existences?...In Pursuit of Love is not only a true and honest account of biographical obsession, but a tale of the uncanny in which the pursuer and persued become one. * The Oldie *
A nuanced portrait of an enigmatic woman and a biographer in pursuit of her story. * Kirkus Reviews *
[Mark's] remarkable openness and vulnerability make his a compelling tale to follow. * Guernsey Press and Star *
A compelling experiment in biography-cum-memoir, guided by the conviction that someone else’s life offers ‘a prism through which to revisit or examine parts of one’s own’. * Times Literary Supplement *
Just as she herself became a dedicated stalker, so Bostridge, following her trail a century later to Nova Scotia and the Caribbean, starts to assume a similar identity, creating a parallel drama for us out of moments of emotional vulnerability in his own life…Blurring the edges of biography and autobiography, Bostridge displays a profound empathy for Adele, even at her most baffling and elusive. * Literary Review *
In Pursuit of Love is ostensibly about Victor Hugo’s troubled daughter Adèle, but it also affords fascinating insights into the biographer’s art and, to a surprising degree, into the life of Bostridge himself. -- Andrew Roberts * TLS Books of the Year 2024 *
ISBN: 9781399416023
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
288 pages