And abandoning the resolutely silent firmament, she quickly made her way beside the verdant lawns towards King’s Parade. Somehow her dancing lessons had survived those most precious times were left to her. Don’t let me, God, I beg of you! Show me some other way to live.”Ī church clock struck four, and another … and suddenly she smiled, the grave little face utterly transformed as she picked up her case. “Don’t let me marry Edward just to get away from home.

“Don’t let me give in, God,” she begged, tilting back her head, sending the long soft hair cascading down her back as she searched the quiet, dove-grey sky of Cambridge for some portent – Halley’s comet the pointing finger of Isfrael – to indicate deliverance. Harriet hugs her love of dance to herself, feeds swans, and prays: The fiancé? Edward Finch-Dutton, a scientist with hopes for a bright academic future, one part of which is marrying the daughter of a Master who can further his career. We are introduced to Harriet as she muses on the fate her father, aunt-from-hell, and the Ladies of the Trumpington Tea Circle have determined for her: early marriage. Read it for the romance, remember it for how love is our most vital calling. MissB will, in a most unscholarly fashion, pen what struck her about Ibbotson’s theology in A Company Of Swans. All’s well that end’s well, as is the Bard’s wisdom and the romance genre’s. Rom plays shiny-armor knight, in a scene reminiscent of one of MissB’s favourites, the ending of Hitchcock’s Notorious. Another Woman, sundry parties’ nasty machinations, including Harriet’s father, aunt, and ex-fiancé, conspire to destroy Harriet and Rom’s love affair. Rom falls in immediate love, as does Harriet, but they, for individual reasons, bide their time. There, she meets Rom, a wealthy, generous, darkly good-looking, self-exiled ex-pat. Her love of dance leads to her escape from her father’s house to join an eccentric company of dancers and prima ballerina, Simonova, slated to dance in the Amazon rainforest. To set the scene: Harriet lives in 1912 Cambridge, England, under her father’s and aunt’s puritanical, stringent, miserly, dour thumbs. Religious references are threaded throughout Harriet and Rom’s great love.

Woven into Harriet and Rom’s magnificent romance is Ibbotson’s notion of what faith constitutes: how it calls us and how we enact it. Miss Bates read one of the best romances ever and it was Eva Ibbotson’s A Company Of Swans.

A Company of Swans by Eva Ibbotson