My Next Bride by Kay Boyle [Paperback: Very Good]

Virago Modern Classics paperback in Very Good condition (330 pages)

"I am ready to take each act of my life as a stone in my hands, never to be denied, and my words will be like stones to myself, hard and irrevocable."

Victoria John, a young American with Puritanism in her blood, arrives in Paris in 1933 and takes a room in a Neuilly lodging-house.  Here are two Russian women, starving and shivering over the remnants of their gentility who advise her to leave and tell her of Sorrel the visionary in his steel-grey tunic.  Drawn into his fantastic artists' community where she sells hand-woven scarves, she witnesses the dirt and conniving behind the scenes.  Victoria is looking for truth but stumbles instead into drunkenness and emotional chaos when she meets the erratic artist, Anthony Lister.

First published in 1934, this autobiographical novel which lays bare one woman's path to self-discovery, is a poetic and imaginative achievement.