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Hotel du Lac | Introduction

Hotel du Lac, by British novelist Anita Brookner, was published in 1984. Brookner's fourth novel, it won the Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious literary award. As a result of her first three novels, Brookner had won a reputation for writing about the difficulties faced by middle-aged, single, lonely women, and Hotel du Lac follows this pattern. It also owes something to the genre of popular romance novels; its heroine, Edith Hope, is a successful writer of such novels. She has been dispatched by her friends in London to a hotel in Switzerland because of an unfortunate lapse on her part, although the reader is not initially informed about what the lapse was. Edith intends to use her temporary stay to finish her latest romance novel, but instead she spends much of her time observing and interacting with the other hotel guests, who include a rich and glamorous but self-centered elderly widow and her daughter; an upper-class young woman who suffers from an eating disorder; a lonely, old and deaf countess; and an enigmatic man named Mr. Neville. The self-effacing, quiet Edith, a romantic soul whose relationships with men are less than satisfactory, spends much time thinking about how a woman ought to behave in order to satisfy her longings for love, as well as recalling in painful detail the reasons for her banishment. In the end, Edith receives a proposition from Mr. Neville that forces her to think deeply about what she really wants in life and whether she is prepared to compromise her ideals.

Hotel du Lac Summary

Chapters 1-4

Hotel du Lac begins in late September at a quiet, respectable hotel in Switzerland, where Edith Hope, a thirty-nine-year-old English writer of romantic novels, has just arrived. Edith's friends have persuaded her to take a month's break away from her home in London, since they consider her, for some reason as yet undisclosed to the reader, to be in disgrace.

Edith hopes to be able to finish her latest novel while staying at the hotel, although her first act upon arrival is to write to David, the married man with whom she is having an affair. At dinner that night she observes the hotel guests. She notices a slender Englishwoman and her small dog, Kiki; a silent countess, Mme de Bonneuil; and a glamorous, energetic English lady who appears to be in her sixties (it later transpires that she is seventy-nine) and her daughter. Edith's observations of and interactions with these and other guests, and her consequent reflections on her own life, form the substance of the novel.

After dinner, the glamorous lady invites Edith to join them. Mrs. Iris Pusey is a wealthy widow from London who regularly comes to the Hotel du Lac with her daughter Jennifer for the sole purpose of going on shopping expeditions for luxury items, such as fine clothes and jewelry. The conversation between Mrs. Pusey and Edith is entirely one-sided, since the older lady talks only about herself. Edith does not mind this, however, since she has no desire to share information about herself. Edith's observation of Mrs. Pusey sparks her reflections about what kind of behavior is most becoming to a woman, since the outgoing, confident Mrs. Pusey is the complete opposite of the quiet, self-effacing Edith.

Edith also notices the closeness and affection between Mrs. Pusey and Jennifer, and this observation leads her to recall her own very different relationship with her mother, Rosa. In her youth in Vienna, Rosa had been beautiful and flirtatious. But soon after her marriage to a university professor she became bored and frustrated. However, when her husband died in his early fifties, Rosa went to pieces, becoming even more unhappy and unreconciled to her fate.

Edith also recalls David, and how they met at a party given by her friend, Penelope. Edith and David exchanged very few words at the party, but David then came to her house several hours later, as she guessed he would,... ยป Complete Hotel du Lac Summary