Olivia — Dorothy Bussy

In this book the theme of first love is handled with great tenderness--its bewildering passion, its alternations of fantasy and acute perception--and the result is an honest and delicate work of art. When, at sixteen, Olivia left her English family to spend a year in a French finishing school near Paris, she moved into an atmosphere of intellectual and spiritual aliveness such as she had never known. Mademoiselle Julie, the brilliant headmistress of the school, opened for her the world of letters, of the theater, of good food and sparkling conversation. Sensitive and intelligent, Olivia responded to it with an adolescent intensity of passion gratitude. Unknowingly, she also developed in more complex relationship with mademoiselle to leave and she could comprehend or control, for there was nothing in her earlier experience to relate it to. It was her first experience of love, and it taught her much about the geography of the world of feeling. It is clear to the reader that Olivia understood at the time only part of the disaster precipitated by the tensions of strife and jealousy in the personalities around her. Olivia's story has a candor and intensity which are only possible because the author has chosen to tell it from the vantage point of an older woman looking back on her girlhood. With the utmost distinction and grace, she reveals through this brief and poignant novel the awakening on many levels of a girl who came through tragedy with an added stature and a deep sense of compassion.