Herself Surprised (NYRB) Book

Herself Surprised, the first volume of Joyc e Cary's remarkable First Trilogy, introduces Sara Monday, a woman at once dissolute and devout, passionate and sly. With no regrets, Sara reviews her changing fortunes , remembering the drudgery of domestic servitude, the pleasures of playing the great lady in a small provincial town, and the splendors and miseries of life as the mode l, muse, and mistress of the painter Gulley Jimson. Each volume of Cary's trilogy, which continues in To Be a Pilgrim and The Horse's Mouth, brings a single character to intense and memorable life and can be read entirely on its own. But when r ead together the three books, with their three strikingly different narrators, affor d new and startling perspectives on each other. In the end, the trilogy offers a swe eping tragicomic vision, at once sympathetic and satirical, of humanity in all its f allenness and freedom. It is the masterwork of a writer of dazzling insight and verb al resource, and one of the outstanding landmarks of twentieth-century fiction.Read More