Mark Bostridge's innovative biography…weaving episodes of his own emotional life into hers and producing something of haunting beauty and stylistic grace...a book full of pain and sadness, but one that is a melancholy pleasure to read.” —Daily Telegraph
“In this gloriously rich and capacious book, the biographer Mark Bostridge sets out to unravel the story of Adele, the promising girl who was born into republican France's equivalent to a royal family yet spent most of her adult life being unravelled by love… What makes Bostridge's offering so compelling is that much of his book is taken up with the process of writing a deeply researched non-fiction book.” —The Sunday Times
“It's the saddest story ever told - and told so beautifully that you wish it would never end. The author's search for the truth about Victor Hugo's daughter carries him across oceans and into the darkest corners of his own past. It's an unforgettable journey.” —Ferdinand Mount, author of Kiss Myself Goodbye
“A haunting and utterly engrossing book – not just a brilliant study of Adele Hugo's obsessive and unrequited love, but full of revelations about the biographer himself, as he pursues the truth about her life, and finds in the process many parallel truths about his own.” —Claire Harman, author of Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart
“Profound, shattering, and utterly immersive.” —Frances Wilson, author of Burning Man: The Ascent of DH Lawrence
“This excavation of a buried woman – covered by the sands of time, hearsay, rumours that attach to celebrity, and her own misinformation – sifts the very practice of biography. As a strange story of an obsession comes to light, Bostridge questions our reliance on documentation and challenges the illusion of objectivity with the biographer's own obsessiveness as he finds touching parallels in his own life that bring him closer to elusive truth.” —Lyndall Gordon, author of The Hyacinth Girl: T. S. Eliot's Hidden Muse
“Bostridge elegantly and poignantly interweaves tales of amorous grief and mental illness.” —The Spectator
“Why, Bostridge asks in this hypersensitive and utterly immersive book, are biographers drawn to certain stories? In what ways do the historical lives we explore reflect on our own unexamined existences?...In Pursuit of Love is not only a true and honest account of biographical obsession, but a tale of the uncanny in which the pursuer and persued become one.” —The Oldie
“A nuanced portrait of an enigmatic woman and a biographer in pursuit of her story.” —Kirkus Reviews
“[Mark's] remarkable openness and vulnerability make his a compelling tale to follow.” —Guernsey Press and Star
2024-05-17
Biography and autobiography merge in this intriguing tale about Victor Hugo’s daughter.
Bostridge, author of Letters From a Lost Generation and Florence Nightingale, turns inward in this detailed personal reflection on the tragic story of Hugo’s daughter, Adèle (1830-1915), who’s well known thanks to Truffaut’s L’Histoire d’Adèle H. “As I pursue Adèle Hugo in the pages that follow,” writes the author, “fragments of my story will shadow hers.” Throughout, Bostridge relishes digressions on many topics, including Victor Hugo and his family and the author’s own life. “In writing about other people’s lives,” he reflects, “you learn to be wary of your imagination….Meanwhile the rational part of oneself remains earthbound.” After Louis-Napoleon’s rise to power, the Hugo family moved to the island of Jersey—with Bostridge figuratively in tow. He seems as obsessed with Adèle as she was with Albert Pinson. As the author recounts, Adèle pursued him, and when he left to join the military, she was crushed. The family then moved to the neighboring island of Guernsey. Adèle, then 26, experienced periods of “moody introspection, symptomatic of her distress at Albert Pinson’s departure.” A few years later, she traveled to the Isle of Wight. Bostridge is certain Pinson promised to marry her; he shares a photo of Pinson in uniform, as well as a marriage license, dated 1861. Apparently, Pinson visited the Hugo family, and shortly after, he was stationed to Halifax, unmarried. Adèle followed. At this point, the author examines her “acute mental disturbance.” When Pinson was assigned to Barbados, Adèle followed again. Pinson next moved to Dublin, where he married, and Adèle, suffering from mental illness, returned to Paris, where she eventually entered a private asylum. Bostridge’s journey is “messy, unpredictable, and contradictory”—yet rarely boring.
A nuanced portrait of an enigmatic woman and a biographer in pursuit of her story.
