Briefly, a Delicious Life by Nell Stevens review – on holiday with Chopin and George Sand | Fiction
Nell Stevens’s two works of nonfiction, Bleaker House and Mrs Gaskell & Me, are about her attempts to write, respectively, a novel and a PhD. The young author travels, falls in and out of love, and studies writers from the 19th century as she tries both to make sense of and escape from an uncertain present. Her own prose is frank and companionable, shrewd and funny, capturing the privileged peripatetic grind of the archive stacks and the writers’ retreat. The narrator navigates a path between an obsessive work ethic…