“She writes that she will walk across the ocean to be with her lover. He sees this, not as a declaration of love, but as a statement of a single-mindedness so total that a kind of grandeur creeps into it.”

CBR17 Bingo: I – Re: the title.

Victor Hugo was the most famous writer in the world when his daughter, Adèle, left their home in Guernsey on a years-long mad pursuit of a former lover. Centuries later, author Mark Bostridge retraces her steps and tries to understand her obsession in the prism of his own life.

I have not seen acclaimed 1975 film The Story of Adele H., so this was my first real acquaintance with the strange life of Adèle Hugo, whose story was long obscured by her own family out of the shame of her mental illness and her loss of reputation.

Readers seemed to have mixed reactions to Bostridge’s wedding of the incidents of Adèle’s life to his own – I am one who comes down on the side of loving it. Without it, Adèle’s story alone would have made for too slim a story, but beyond that, Bostridge’s own life contextualizes hers, and encourages the reader to draw closer too. Suddenly she is not a remote historical figure but a person driven by the same kinds of impulses and obsessions as someone we may know – maybe even ourselves.

The writing is lovely and poetic, and as we trace Adèle’s footsteps her story expands beyond the mere single-minded pursuit of the unprepossessing Lt. Albert Pinson. We explore her life as the recorder of her father’s every pearl of wisdom, laboring under the shadow of her older sister’s untimely demise, the utter isolation she faces in her family exile to Jersey and later Guernsey, and by the time she takes flight to chase her erstwhile lover across the sea you have come much closer to understanding what drove her to it. I was also impressed by how much the author was able to reveal about Albert Pinson, the object of her obsession, to learn for the first time how he might have felt about his stalker.

The sections in Newfoundland and Barbados did feel a little lighter on detail – understandably as Adèle’s writings from this time are presumed lost, and much of the information remaining comes down as oral accounts. However, as the author hunts for the homes that Adèle was alleged to have lived in, I thought we lost a chance to peer closer into what may have been going through her mind at these times.

Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.