In the Wilderness

Dion Leith, coming home from Greece in 1894, meets in Milan the girl he will marry — Rosamund Everard, beautiful, musical and of an exacting religious faith — and takes her back to Greece to stand before the Hermes at Olympia. A son is born, war comes in South Africa, Dion volunteers, and what follows drives husband and wife into separate wildernesses before the Hermes sees them together again. Hichens made his name at twenty-nine with The Green Carnation, an anonymous satire on Wilde withdrawn after the trials; here he writes a marriage at enormous length, and Greece does the work the plot would otherwise have to. Fifty-five plates of quiet interiors and musical rooms by Hammershøi and Alma-Tadema catch the hush of a marriage strained across Greece and the Artists' Rifles.