Trilby

One day after a long session shelf-diving on Goodreads, I came upon the title of Trilby by DuMaurier. I was pleased to discover my local library had a copy, and placed it on hold. Over a year later, I received notice that it had come in. It was a first edition in the original, now torn, binding and......more

Trilby is highly sentimental, in the worst tradition of late-19th century British fiction, and were it not set in Paris and London, I might be tempted to think of it as kailyard. Svengali and Trilby and several other characters are memorable, but they’re not enough to rescue the novel from bathos. A......more

Beauty Without Talent From school with strict cheerless nuns to university, where I came under the severe hand of my tutor, I identified with the eponymous Trilby the moment I opened the pages of George du Maurier's novel of domination and submission, a book with an undercurrent of eroticism that can......more

An unusual fairly anti-Semitic melodrama about the lives of several expatriates in bohemian Paris. The second half tells what becomes of them, including the beautiful young model, Trilby, who becomes a singing sensation under the tutelage of the mysterious Svengali. My favorite parts centered on the......more

I thought I knew what a Svengali was but I did NOT! I thought it to mean a person of such amounts of charisma and charm that people (usually women) would find them absolutely irresistible. But the Svengali of George DuMaurier is none of those things. He reminds me of the descriptions of Rasputin. He......more