Lucinda Brayford (Classic Australian Works)

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The married couple live happily in England until Hugo begins making excuses for long absences from Lucinda. First Canadian edition first printing of a very good plus hardcover with one small colour fade, in a very good dustjacket with 2 small closed tears and a crease along the top on the front cover and minor wear at the extremities. This is the story of a beautiful woman set mainly in Melbourne, Victoria and England, from the early 1900s to the Second World War. This novel was adapted for a television mini-series in 1980, produced by Oscar Whitbread and directed by John Gauci, from a screenplay by Cliff Green, featuring Wendy Hughes as Lucinda, and Sam Neill as Tony Duff.

As well, various social conflicts are expressed in her life when she marries into a titled family and her wealth and prestige give way to the changing times. But the main story follows their daughter Lucinda, in her marriage to Huge Brayford, outwardly a conventional, easy-going ""younger son"", assuming his wife will decorate his chosen path, while he strays down forbidden lanes. In later scenes, he tightens shots to make half a dozen extras look like a crowd and fakes the European and English locations. These novels—particularly Lucinda Brayford (1946) and the Langton quartet, beginning with The Cardboard Crown (1952)—were chronicles too of the decline of the genteel and aristocratic tradition.Then World War I cripples and disfigures Hugo, and there's irony in Lucinda becoming the one who adopts marital infidelity as a way of life- and that with Huge's closest friend.

In a sense, the novel is the biography of Lucinda Brayford; descriptions of the generations preceding hers serve to establish the context of her life. We're introduced to William Vane (lucindas grandfather) who has to move from England to Australia after he develops and unsavory reputation. If you are a fan of the Brontes, Henry James, Edith Wharton, or any late 19th-early 20th C literature dealing with class, relationships, manners or society, you will enjoy this novel. He takes to prolonged hunting excursions and business trips, which Lucinda later discovers to be pretexts for assignations with an old love.These would-be aristocrats were parvenues, nouveaux riches brought to their station by ambition rather than by history, breeding, and education. The events than focus on his relationships with his family, his friends, his marriage to a Vane family member, and WW2.