Lavinia

Lavinia by Rhoda Broughton (1902)

Lavinia Carew, orphaned young and raised by her irascible uncle Sir George Campion in a Kentish village, has grown up as the family's perpetual "buffer," soothing the clashes between her uncle and his two sons, gentle Rupert and the now-dead Bill. She has always expected to marry her cousin Rupert, to whom she has been engaged since childhood, though the arrangement is a matter of habit rather than passion, and Rupert's soft, artistic temperament and confessed dislike of physical courage sit awkwardly beside his father's contempt. Against this backdrop unfolds the tragicomic saga of the neighboring Prince family, enriched by "Prince's Dropless Candle." Their daughter Féodorovna, an eccentric young woman convinced of her own unconventional nobility, writes to a celebrated general offering herself to him in marriage; he gently refuses. Undeterred and unembarrassed, she next petitions the Director-General of the Army Medical Department to let her nurse soldiers in South Africa, and is again refused. Mrs. Prince repeatedly brings her domestic mortifications to Lavinia, who dispenses patient, if privately astonished, comfort. The news arrives that Bill Campion has died in the Boer War, saved at the cost of his own life by a fellow officer, Captain Binning, whom Bill rescued under fire before being mortally wounded himself. Sir George is shattered, oscillating between grief and bitter jibes at Rupert for being alive and unmilitary. Pressed by Mrs. Darcy, the sensible Rectory wife who is Lavinia's closest friend and one of the few skeptical of the Campion match, Lavinia realizes her marriage to Rupert is now urgently wanted to preserve the family name, since Rupert is the last male Campion. She and Rupert agree, somewhat matter-of-factly, to marry, and Sir George settles money on her and showers her with his late wife's jewels. Captain Binning is brought to convalesce at the Princes' house, where Féodorovna appoints herself his devoted, disastrously incompetent nurse. Lavinia visits out of duty and finds herself unexpectedly drawn to Binning; their conversations grow charged, though she insists to him and herself that her marriage to Rupert is a lifelong, unbreakable, if loveless, bargain. When Féodorovna is struck down with jaundice, Lavinia is pressed into nursing Binning herself, and during Rupert and Sir George's absence in London, she and Binning spend long, emotionally fraught hours together, culminating in his kissing her hand at night, which leaves her sleepless and disturbed by feelings she cannot name. As Binning recovers enough to sit up and move about, their mutual attraction becomes harder to disguise, even as Rupert writes affectionately from London, where Sir George has fallen seriously ill after over-exerting himself, delaying Lavinia and Rupert's wedding by a week.

By Rhoda Broughton · First published 1902 · Genre: Novel of Manners, Domestic Drama, Psychological Realism · 26 chapters · 93,361 words

First lines

"I shall never get over it."

This is a phrase that has issued from the same lips very often before; and in general Lavinia Carew listens to it silently, in the impatient confidence that at her next visit to Mrs. Prince, that lady will have got over "it" so completely as to have forgotten that "it" ever existed. She is silent now, but from an opposite reason to that which has hitherto tied her tongue. In her opinion neither Mrs. Prince nor any other Mrs. or Miss could ever get over the "it" in question.

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Kent · England · Boer War · early twentieth century · domestic novel · family drama · romance · love triangle · forbidden love · duty · social propriety · grief

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