Nell Stevens’s two works of nonfiction, Bleaker House and Mrs Gaskell & Me, are about her attempts to write, respectively, a novel and a PhD. The young author travels, falls in and out of love, and studies writers from the 19th century as she tries both to make sense of and escape from an uncertain present. Her own prose is frank and companionable, shrewd and funny, capturing the privileged peripatetic grind of the archive stacks and the writers’ retreat. The narrator navigates a path between an obsessive work ethic and a highly developed capacity for distraction, a scorn for the trappings of heterosexual marriage and a desire to settle down.
Stevens’s debut novel, Briefly, a Delicious Life, develops many of these themes. It focuses on 19th-century artists – the composer Frédéric Chopin and the writer born Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dudevant, later known as George Sand – and is organised around a trip abroad, this time from Paris to Mallorca in 1838. The group of unconventional tourists includes Sand’s two children, Maurice and Solange, and Amélie, a maid who dreams of home. They stay in the cold, damp cells of the Charterhouse, a monastery once inhabited by a Carthusian order.
