I Read Books: Trilby

 

Trilby

Three British artists, Taffy, Little Billee and the Laird, living in Paris, meet a variety of oddball characters. One of them is Trilby O’Farrell, orphan, laundress and artist’s model. It seems she is in demand for having the most perfect feet. They also meet the unpleasant Svengali, musician and music teacher, and his sidekick Gecko, a violinist. Trilby has a powerful voice, but is completely tone deaf.

Little Billee, having proposed marriage to Trilby nineteen times, declares on the twentieth that if she does not accept him he will leave Paris forever. She agrees, but then his respectable family convince her to break the engagement as being a mesalliance and she leaves with her brother for the country.

Little Billee leaves, becomes a respected artist as William Bagot, and after an extended sequence of failing to marry, re-unites with Taffy and the Laird five years later in London. The talk of the town is an extraordinary singer, La Svengali, who they go and see. It is, of course, the almost unrecognisable Trilby, being conducted by Svengali.

An incident occurs in which Gecko, now first violinist in the orchestra, stabs Svengali; without him to conduct Trilby is unable to sing, and in fact has no memory of singing. Svengali dies of a heart attack and the whole thing descends into a tragedy.

The novel not only gave us the word Svengali, meaning one who grooms and dominates a protegee, and the phrase “in the altogether,” completely naked (Trilby models with a pitcher for “La Source”) but also indirectly the trilby hat, which comes from the first stage adaption. Svengali is Jewish and du Maurier fails the “Victorian novelist don’t be weird about race” challenge in a spectacularly antisemitic manner.

Read This: An often entertaining book about art, talent and love
Don’t Read This: It’s dark and ambivalent about prudish respectability
Out Of Print: And available online