Read Nell Stevens’s two earlier works of nonfiction: Bleaker House and The Victorian and the Romantic. This is a book more about sensations and feelings rather than a central conflict therefore it might be not for everyone's taste, but in my opinion this is a beautiful piece of literature nonetheless. You get their history as well as hers, you yearn with Blanca while she yearns, and you learn to understand these deeply flawed human beings through Blanca’s eyes but also their own and each other’s. She persuasively suggests that Margaret Mitchell’s story has been inspirational in the worst possible ways, leading to everything from Trumpism to racist brutality and has inadvertently led to an America even more divided than before.

Her writing is published in The New York Times, Vogue, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Granta and elsewhere. The book is actually beautifully written: there’s a precision to the language that allows it to convey sensuality, bitterness, suffering, love absurdity, all with equal finesse. Blanca has seen people come and go, live and die, but never has she has such a fascination as she does with George, a woman who dresses like a man and recently arrived at the former monastery with her boyfriend, Chopin, and her two children, Solange and Maurice. And since most of my reasons for the rating are due to it being that, let me instead list some reasons you might enjoy it.Stevens’s style’s equally unsteady, some wonderful images, and more accomplished, promising passages vie with less successful sections, although that’s not unexpected in a first novel. In what ways do George’s and Blanca’s first sexual encounters differ from their experiences of queer sexual desire later in life? Mrs Gaskell and Me (2018) draws on her own life and that of the English novelist Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865). Stevens' depiction of her characters' stay on Mallorca is pretty much the opposite of a delicious life, although it leads to a happy awakening for her queer ghost. She began a relationship with a young novice from the Charterhouse, unaware of what would happen to her body and her life as a result.

Eventually, the reader learns that Blanca is not bound to Mallorca, despite having died there and remained there, as a ghost, for hundreds of years.Towards the end of the novel, Blanca uses this ability to see everything that will happen to Chopin and Sand after their time in Mallorca, resulting in pages of compressed narration. Blanca’s ability to sink into characters’ bodies - taste what they taste, feel what they feel, hear what they hear - means that a novel by a dead, disembodied character is surprisingly sensory, fat on life: it is about first kisses but also the scents of oranges and rotting pomegranates, ‘the sweetness of a stray sugar crystal’ from an apple tart dissolving on a tongue.

Everyone is so amazingly complex and nuanced because no one, especially not Blanca, is a reliable narrator. As George and Chopin, who wear their unconventionality, in George’s case, literally on their sleeves, find themselves in deepening trouble with the provincial, 19th-century villagers, Blanca watches helplessly and reflects on the circumstances of her own death (which involved an ill-advised love affair with a monk-in-training). The story finds its gravitational pull in the figure of George Sand, who has brought Chopin to Mallorca for convalescence. After all, as I pointed out in the opening of this review, that’s kind of the problem with life as a whole.

When Sand and Chopin became lovers, he was already showing signs of the tuberculosis that would eventually destroy his health, so in 1838, the couple travelled to a remote area of Mallorca, Valldemossa, in the belief that sun and fresh air would aid Chopin’s recovery. But for all her vivid atmospherics, Stevens is surprisingly insouciant about some details, including why Blanca is the only ghost around.

All these things are heavily present in the fabric of the narrative and yet I'm not sure which one I was supposed to pay the most attention to since all of them are delicately touched upon yet not intricately enough pursued. she also had her own heartbreaking and saddening story, adding to the overall somber nature of the novel. Blanca also builds a connection with George’s lover Chopin and her two children, Maurice and Solange. Blanca's afterlife as a spirit able to inhabit people's minds to 'live' through their senses, also allows us to view their memories and, thus, read their histories through glimpses of their memory. Having Blanca for a narrator manages to give the book both a sense of intimacy and sense of expansiveness: she is able to directly access people’s thoughts, along with moments from their past and the full tapestry of their future.He had barely looked at the girl since she started to show and had not bothered to explain to her that what was happening to her was his fault entirely. He pointed at the portraits of the Madonna that lined the walls of the Charterhouse corridors: canvas after canvas of broad, white foreheads, beatific smiles, occasional exposed breasts proffered to babies with the faces of old men.