The Passionate Elopement.

In a fashionable spa town of the eighteenth century, where reputations are made and unmade over the tea-tables and the card-tables, a romance stirs beneath the powder and the wit. Compton Mackenzie's debut novel savours every detail of that mannered world.

What it's about

The Passionate Elopement unfolds in an elegant Georgian watering-place, among its beaux and belles, its gossip and its intrigues. As the title promises, at the heart of the story lies a love affair that dares the conventions of polite society, played out against a richly imagined backdrop of assemblies, flirtations, and social manoeuvring. Mackenzie tells it with a connoisseur's delight in the period's style and a light, ironic touch.

Themes

The novel is a comedy of manners in the classic vein, alive to the games of courtship, the tyranny of fashion, and the tension between genuine feeling and social performance. Beneath its decorative surface it observes the perennial contest between the heart's desires and the rules society imposes upon them.

Why it still matters

As the first novel of a writer who would become one of the twentieth century's most prolific and versatile storytellers, it is of real interest, and it stands on its own as an accomplished, atmospheric period entertainment. Its loving recreation of a vanished elegance remains a pleasure to inhabit.

Who it's for

For readers who enjoy witty historical romance and the comedy of manners, for admirers of Compton Mackenzie, and for anyone who likes to lose themselves in the powdered charm of the eighteenth century.