The great French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes spent the most productive decades of his life in the Netherlands in the mid-17th century. While in Amsterdam, he began a relationship with Helena Jans van der Strom, a young servant working in the house where he stayed. In her accomplished first novel, shortlisted for a Costa award, Glasfurd gives her a voice to narrate this coming together of two people with a great imbalance in their relative power and self-determination. A few facts can be gleaned from records: Helena had Descartes’s child and he provided for them both. Glasfurd has fleshed out this skeleton with a quietly passionate story of a young woman who burns to be allowed to write, to acquire knowledge, and to love her elusive Monsieur. In casting Helena as proto-feminist, artistic, courageous, Glasfurd gives her narrative a rather modern sensibility but it is this quality that makes it such a satisfying read. She brilliantly dissects the complex frustrations of a woman in love with a man consumed by intellectual obsessions. There is much to move us here.
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