Lucinda Brayford
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: 1st aus ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Yellowed
Condition remarks: price clipped dj.
Few novels capture the sweep of an entire civilisation with such devastating elegance as Martin Boyd's Lucinda Brayford — a work that chronicles three generations of an Anglo-Australian family from the sunlit drawing rooms of colonial Melbourne to the scarred landscapes of post-war Europe. At the heart of the novel stands Lucinda herself, a woman of rare beauty and quiet moral complexity, whose life traces the arc of a class in slow, irreversible decline. Boyd presents her story with the measured precision of a social anatomist, dissecting the rituals of privilege, the tyranny of expectation, and the quiet tragedies that accumulate beneath a veneer of propriety. Written with the sensibility of a latter-day Henry James and the cultural authority of an author who straddles two worlds, Lucinda Brayford stands as one of the great, unjustly overlooked achievements of twentieth-century Australian literature. Boyd illustrates the corrosive tension between inherited tradition and the modern world with a prose style at once luminous and restrained, drawing the reader into a world where every social gesture carries the weight of consequence. Originally published in 1946 and later championed as a landmark of Australian fiction, this is a novel that rewards patient, discerning readers — leaving one to wonder whether Lucinda's quiet tragedy is ultimately a personal failing, or an indictment of the world that shaped her.
Author: Martin Boyd
Format: Hardback
Published: 1969, Lansdowne Press
Genre: Australian history
Edition: 1st aus ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Yellowed
Condition remarks: price clipped dj.
Few novels capture the sweep of an entire civilisation with such devastating elegance as Martin Boyd's Lucinda Brayford — a work that chronicles three generations of an Anglo-Australian family from the sunlit drawing rooms of colonial Melbourne to the scarred landscapes of post-war Europe. At the heart of the novel stands Lucinda herself, a woman of rare beauty and quiet moral complexity, whose life traces the arc of a class in slow, irreversible decline. Boyd presents her story with the measured precision of a social anatomist, dissecting the rituals of privilege, the tyranny of expectation, and the quiet tragedies that accumulate beneath a veneer of propriety. Written with the sensibility of a latter-day Henry James and the cultural authority of an author who straddles two worlds, Lucinda Brayford stands as one of the great, unjustly overlooked achievements of twentieth-century Australian literature. Boyd illustrates the corrosive tension between inherited tradition and the modern world with a prose style at once luminous and restrained, drawing the reader into a world where every social gesture carries the weight of consequence. Originally published in 1946 and later championed as a landmark of Australian fiction, this is a novel that rewards patient, discerning readers — leaving one to wonder whether Lucinda's quiet tragedy is ultimately a personal failing, or an indictment of the world that shaped her.