TENNYSON’S GIFT - Softcover

Truss

3.29

203 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007355270 ISBN 13: 9780007355273

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2010

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From the bestselling author of ‘Eats Shoots & Leaves’, an unexpectedly moving, luminously wise and brilliantly funny novel about a Victorian Poet Laureate.

In July 1864, a corner of the Isle of Wight is buzzing with literary and artistic creativity. A morose Tennyson is reciting 'Maud' to empty sofas; the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron is white-washing the roses for visual effect and the mismatched couple, actress Ellen Terry and painter G. F. Watts, are thrown into the company of the remarkable Lorenzo Fowler, the American phrenologist, and his daughter Jessie. Enter mathematician Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll), known to Jessie as the 'fiendish pedagogue', and Lynne Truss's wonderfully imaginative cocktail of Victorian seriousness and riotous farce begins to take flight.

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Review:

Farce is one of the hardest literary forms to bring off: in Tennyson's Gift Lynne Truss manages the correct combination of inventiveness, planning and energy. All of her historical figures have fixed ideas that make them act against their own best interests--Tennyson is paranoid about reviews and photographs and Lewis Carroll is a snob fascinated by photography and small girls; the painter Watts agonises about past betrayals while ignoring his young actress wife Ellen Terry.

This is all the more a tour-de-force because Truss knows her material well enough to make much of the comic exaggeration come from things that were actually the case--the Tennysons spent their time on the Isle of Wight desperately hoping for a royal visit. She adds to the mix a phrenologist with an obnoxious child and a writer of anonymous letters, so that the sections of this novel continually build up comic intensity.

Most of the comedy here comes from excellent structure and timing and only in part from our preparedness to view eminent Victorians with the condescension of hindsight; this is an extravaganza with its roots in good sense and a fascination with the famous dead as they actually were. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

'A comic novel of subtle distinction... A richly entertaining book, and at times a very moving one' The Times

'An enormously entertaining novel, with some terrific writing throughout... a fast-moving farce which allows her sideswipes at the foibles of the famous. It is a delicious confection with some marvellous one-liners' Sunday Telegraph

'[A] wonderfully inventive jeu d'esprit... This epic of the Isle of Wight's literary apogee is virtually the perfect summer book. No deck-chair will be complete without it' Independent

‘An enormously entertaining novel, with terrific writing throughout.’ Sunday Telegraph

'A rollicking read. It is mischievous, light-hearted and fun' Literary Review

‘Terrific... ‘Tennyson's Gift’ is witty, surprising, oddly compassionate and hugely assured.’ Sunday Times

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