A rediscovered work by one of the most exciting novelists of the 1930s
Virginia Hutton resides in a London club for single women, living a tedious life which never changes from year to year. She decides to take on a bizarre experiment and buys a young orangutan and names him Appius.
She takes him to a cottage and spends years in isolation trying to raise and educate him as if he were a human child.
Virginia tries to teach the ape how to eat, sleep, read and speak like a human, all the time keeping the project and Appius hidden from the world. Over eight years, her stern teaching methods begin to bear fruit, but do Virginia and Appius really have the deep mutual understanding she craves?
Appius and Virginia was first published by Martin Secker in 1932 and is now republished by Abandoned Bookshop, the imprint which aims to uncover the best books that have been forgotten or lost sight of. It is the imprint’s first physical edition.
Spotlight Post
Thank you, G.E. TREVELYAN and Eye and Lightning Books
About the author
G.E. TREVELYAN is the epitome of a ‘forgotten’ author. She was born Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan in 1903 into a family of means. When she was an undergraduate at Lady Margaret Hall at the University of Oxford, she was the first woman to be awarded the Newdigate Prize for poetry.
She then moved to London, where she quietly began a literary career. Appius and Virginia was her first novel, and its unusual subject matter piqued reviewers’ interest. Leonora Eyles wrote in the TLS on the book’s first publication: “There are times when it is painful to go on reading, but impossible to shirk it.” It still has power today, with Brad Bigelow of Neglected Books pointing out that Virginia’s need to validate her existence by connecting with an ape means Appius and Virginia “may be one of the most powerful stories about loneliness ever written”.
Trevelyan wrote another seven novels before her flat was bombed in the London Blitz, and she died of her injuries in 1941.
Book Links
http://eye-books.com/books/appius-and-virginia
16 NOVEMBER 2020
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