Girls Together

Girls Together by Amy Ella Blanchard

Awakening by Maud Diver is a novel of romantic and cultural collision set against the sun-drenched backdrop of the Cap d'Antibes on the French Riviera in the early twentieth century. Nevil Sinclair, a charming, artistically gifted, and chronically undecided eldest son of an English baronet, has fled to Antibes to escape his sister Lady Roscoe's pressure to stand for Parliament. Idling in the hotel gardens, he is arrested by a vision on a balcony: Lilamani, a young high-caste Hindu girl of extraordinary beauty, wrapped in a pale sari, gazing out to sea. Unable to resist the artistic impulse, he begins sketching her, certain that he has found the subject capable of transforming his long-promising but unfulfilled talent into something of genuine worth. Through his old friend Audrey Hammond, a practical and self-possessed woman doctor who has returned from medical work in India, Nevil learns that Lilamani is the daughter of Sir Lakshman Singh, a cultivated and broad-minded Indian gentleman who has brought his daughter to Europe to study medicine. Lilamani had been threatened with marriage to an elderly, dissolute bridegroom selected by orthodox family forces at home; her father, defying considerable opposition, sided with her refusal and accepted Audrey's bold suggestion that the girl should instead pursue medical training in England. The escape was won at the cost of her mother's blessing and her own caste standing. Nevil, galvanized by his Italian artist friend Andrea Martino's passionate conviction that the sketch proves a genuine creative gift, seeks and obtains Sir Lakshman's reluctant permission to paint Lilamani's portrait. The sittings begin. Audrey, who has long carried an unacknowledged love for Nevil and who fears the disruption of her carefully laid plans for her pupil, supervises with increasing strain. Lilamani, who came to Europe ostensibly to become a doctor, finds the dry facts of medical study painful and uncongenial; her imagination and sensibility are captured instead by Nevil's world of art, poetry, and romantic feeling. Slowly, through stolen glances, delicate exchanges about colour and sea and the poetry of life, and the shared excitement of the picture's progress, both Lilamani and Nevil fall in love. Cuthbert Broome, the large-hearted novelist who is Nevil's closest friend and observer of human nature, watches the development with shrewd attention. Mrs. Despard, a warm-spirited Anglo-Indian woman who arrives at the hotel, immediately recognizes Lilamani's quality and champions both her and Nevil's artistic ambitions. Matters come to a head during a boat excursion that turns into a storm. Separated briefly from the others while taking shelter under an archway, Nevil declares himself to Lilamani and she, though trembling with consciousness of every obstacle, cannot deny that she loves him in return. She insists that no promise can be given without her father's consent, and that she herself must speak to him first. That night Lilamani kneels beside her father and, in a scene of quiet eloquence, pleads her cause. She acknowledges the immensity of what she must sacrifice: caste, religious ceremony, the daily world of home, her mother's blessing, the possibility of return. She reminds her father that it is his own broad idealism, his own teaching, his own admiration for England and for free marriage between consenting hearts, that has led her step by step to this moment. Sir Lakshman, moved and defeated by the truth of her appeal, grants a conditional consent: Nevil must go away for a week, the two must consider everything in the cool of separation, and Sir Lakshman must first satisfy himself that the young man understands and is prepared to face every difficulty honestly. The interview between Sir Lakshman and Nevil that follows is the novel's intellectual and moral centre. The two men speak with complete frankness about family pride on both sides, about the absence of religious consecration in a civil marriage, about the likely prejudice of the Sinclair family, about the fate of mixed-race children, and about Nevil's need to choose between his father's wishes and his own life. Nevil, stripped of every evasion, stands firm. Sir Lakshman, persuaded of the young man's sincerity and genuine love, moves toward a full consent, the completion of which the novel holds in suspension as the section concludes. Running beneath the love story is Audrey's private tragedy: her discovery, in the midst of her most zealous professional efforts, that she has fallen helplessly in love with Nevil herself, that the rational, progressive, self-sufficient life she has built rests on a suppressed human need she has denied, and that she must watch the man she loves choose another woman while continuing to serve and protect the girl who has won him.

By Amy Ella Blanchard · First published 1900 · Genre: Historical Fiction, Romance, Literary Fiction · 20 chapters · 78,135 words

First lines

THE sleepy old university town had been for some days alive with the excitement attending class-day and the yearly commencement at the university.

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children's fiction · young adult fiction · girls' friendship · school life · boarding school · coming of age · adolescence · family relationships · social class · early 20th century · historical fiction · domestic life

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Girls Together is listed on Textopian as a novel by Amy Ella Blanchard, dated 1900 CE.

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