![]() ![]() (About the groom: ""Oh, let's be honest, I've no doubt he can be very tricky."") The marriage is promptly in trouble: Robert can't deal with independent Ginevra's sexual sophistication there are fertility/impotence problems then Robert comes down with an ""unnamable paralytic disease""-and Ginevra vows to stand by him. Narrator #1 is Robert, the youngish heir to Oxmoon, who's thrilled when his lost childhood-sweetheart-cousin Ginevra-returns to England as a pliant widow Robert is not so thrilled, however, when he learns that Ginevra was seduced years ago (at 16) by his own father-an unstable philanderer haunted by a family-history of sodomy, adultery, and murder! Still, Robert and Ginevra do marry-as Ginevra takes over the unromanticized narration. ![]() ![]() And the plot-heavy on guilt, illegitimacy, madness, and rivalrous cousins-is loosely based on the 14th-century history of John of Gaunt, Richard II, and the Bolingbrokes. The family is the Welsh/English Godwin clan, based at the Oxmoon manor. Another Howatch family-saga-distinguished, like most of the others, by its length (976 pages!), its energetic parade of first-person narrators, and (most impressively) its vigorous streak of dark, unsentimental irony. ![]()
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