As It Was in the Beginning
About this ebook
Millicent is a woman who has never been fully sure of herself. We see her as a child asking her nanny why she has to live within her body. We see her as a young woman wondering how any eligible bachelor will take an interest in her. We see her as the wife of an older, assured man upon whom she becomes dependent. We suffer with her as a gigolo seduces her, wastes her money, and abandons her. And we feel ourselves with her as she struggles to be understood through her stroke and disorientation. As was her trademark, Gertrude Trevelyan takes us deeper into the mind of her subject than almost any novelist ever attempted, creating an intense and absorbing reading experience.
With great stylistic daring, Gertrude Trevelyan recreates the stream of consciousness in its most realistic and moving form. As It Was in the Beginning is perhaps Trevelyan's most important work, a novel that belongs with To the Lighthouse or As I Lay Dying.
About the author
Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan was born in Bath in 1903. She came to fame as the first woman to win the Newdigate Prize for best undergraduate poem at Oxford. Starting with Appius and Virginia in 1932, she published eight novels, her last being Trance by Appointment in 1939. Her novels Two Thousand Million Man-Power and William’s Wife have been reissued in the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press in 2022. Injured when a German bomb struck her flat in October 1940, she died at her parents' home in March 1941.
Kim Adrian is the author of two books of creative criticism (Dear Knausgaard and Sock), and a memoir, The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet, which was a Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist.
Dr Stanislava Dikova is a postdoctoral researcher and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Essex. Her articles and reviews to date have been published in the LSE Review of Books, The Modernist Review, and Feminist Modernist Studies.
