IN PURSUIT OF LOVE

Biography and autobiography merge in this intriguing tale about Victor Hugo’s daughter.

Bostridge, author of Letters From a Lost Generation and Florence Nightingale, turns inward in this detailed personal reflection on the tragic story of Hugo’s daughter, Adèle (1830-1915), who’s well known thanks to Truffaut’s L’Histoire d’Adèle H. “As I pursue Adèle Hugo in the pages that follow,” writes the author, “fragments of my story will shadow hers.” Throughout, Bostridge relishes digressions on many topics, including Victor Hugo and his family and the author’s own life. “In writing about other people’s lives,” he reflects, “you learn to be wary of your imagination….Meanwhile the rational part of oneself remains earthbound.” After Louis-Napoleon’s rise to power, the Hugo family moved to the island of Jersey—with Bostridge figuratively in tow. He seems as obsessed with Adèle as she was with Albert Pinson. As the author recounts, Adèle pursued him, and when he left to join the military, she was crushed. The family then moved to the neighboring island of Guernsey. Adèle, then 26, experienced periods of “moody introspection, symptomatic of her distress at Albert Pinson’s departure.” A few years later, she traveled to the Isle of Wight. Bostridge is certain Pinson promised to marry her; he shares a photo of Pinson in uniform, as well as a marriage license, dated 1861. Apparently, Pinson visited the Hugo family, and shortly after, he was stationed to Halifax, unmarried. Adèle followed. At this point, the author examines her “acute mental disturbance.” When Pinson was assigned to Barbados, Adèle followed again. Pinson next moved to Dublin, where he married, and Adèle, suffering from mental illness, returned to Paris, where she eventually entered a private asylum. Bostridge’s journey is “messy, unpredictable, and contradictory”—yet rarely boring.

A nuanced portrait of an enigmatic woman and a biographer in pursuit of her story.