Providence

Kitty Maule longs to be "totally unreasonable, totally unfair, very demanding, and very beautiful." She is instead clever, reticent, self-possessed, and striking. For years. Kitty has been tactfully courting her colleague Maurice Bishop, a detached, elegant English professor. Now, running out of patience, Kitty's amorous pursuit takes her from rancorous academic committee rooms and lecture halls to French cathedrals and Parisian rooming houses, from sittings with her dress-making grandmother to seances with a grandmotherly psychic. Touching, funny, and stylistically breathtaking, Providence is a brightly polished gem of romantic comedy.

"Providence recounts, with elegance and precision, the story of a woman's efforts to create a new life for herself ... Brookner has proved herself a master."-- The New York Times

"Ambitious and disturbing ... uncommonly deft, witty and serious." -- The New York Times Book Review

"Anita Brookner's themes -- experience, nationality, faith, innocence and betrayal -- evoke the pleasures of reading Henry James. [Providence is] an intelligent and moving novel." -- Francine Prose

"[A] perfectly observed and quietly witty novel."-- Washington Post