Hotel du Lac

Summary

Edith Hope, a writer of romantic novels, is dispatched to a sober Swiss hotel after disgracing herself at home, where she watches the other off-season guests with detached, melancholy attention. Brookner writes in a precise, lightly ironic register reminiscent of nineteenth-century European fiction, dissecting the compromises offered to thoughtful, unmarried women. The novel's quiet seriousness about loneliness and self-knowledge gave it a lasting place in late-century English fiction.