Cecil

Lady Anne remembers in 1917, during the First World War, how she met Cecil, her husband's half-brother, in 1875. He was then a nine-year-old boy who secretly sneaked into his mother, Lady Guthrie's rooms at tea time: 'Although she was clearly not strict with him, she also did not seem like the classic pampering mother of a delicate only child. Rather, one would say that she treated him as an equal". What follows from there is a story that spans more than thirty years. In her abound the mysteries, the trips, the houses (in Scotland, in Surrey, in London, in Cannes, in Paris), the suspicions and the unpredictable turns; and, always in the background, a continually ill, affected and spiritistic mother and an erratic son, infatuated, without profession, who seems to adore her even at the risk of her own happiness and that of others. The narrator, also a mother, with her cheerful way of understanding the education and independence of her children, admirably serves as a counterpoint to the sinister motherhood exercised by her mother-in-law. She recounts this relationship that she never knows from too far or too close and that, in its ultimate rarity, can only be glimpsed by hints and conjectures. Elizabeth Eliot also introduces in Cecil (1962) a powerful speech about to what extent and in what way it is possible to know the truth. Altogether, it is a haunting novel, with many senses, that is really about the inexplicable.