"Vibrant with an awareness of people and their manners and the countries that shape them."-Sylvia Brownrigg.Henry James's theme of the New World (naïve, upright, puritanical) confronting the Old (steeped in sophisticated and unscrupulous charm) is here explored by a novelist who has witnessed two world wars. Her protagonist is Constanza, a beautiful Italian-American pagan born to privilege and happiness-a seeming "favourite of the gods." But in the years of her maturity she becomes aware of what she lacks-a purpose and a part. Who am I, she asks, and what is it I can do? "This," writes Bedford, "is not a poor little rich girl's plaint. It is the quest that lurks within every human creature fortunate to lift its head above the daily grind.""Bedford's genius is for writing about people. [Her] excellence is immortal, her career one of great distinction in literature."-Peter Levi.Author Sybille Bedford was born in 1911, in Charlottenburg, Germany, and was brought up in Italy, England, and France. "Every reader knows her name," wrote Jan Morris, "but few, I suspect, realize the range of her gifts-novelist, biographer, travel writer, analyst of the law, celebrant of food, and mistress of an altogether inimitable prose." A vice president of English PEN and one of Britain's nine Companions of Literature, Mrs. Bedford lives in London and is currently at work on a memoir.