Synopses & Reviews
Herself Surprised, the first volume of Joyce 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 model, muse, and mistress of the painter Gulley Jimson.
Synopsis
New York Review Books has put back into print Joyce Cary's legendary First Trilogy for the first time in more than thirty years. Each of the three volumes -- Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim, and The Horse's Mouth -- can be read entirely on its own. However, when read together the books, with their strikingly different narrators, afford new and startling perspectives on each other. In the end, the trilogy offers a sweeping vision of humanity in all its fallenness and freedom. It is the masterwork of a writer of dazzling insight and verbal resource, and one of the landmarks of twentieth-century fiction.