At first, she reflects wryly, “She had failed to scale the heights of consumerism that were apparently as open to her as they were to anyone else.” Later she goes shopping for new clothes, only to find that she can’t seem to locate the glamorous shops which the Puseys patronize.

Edith’s reaction is typically ambivalent. Pusey takes Edith under her wing (which in practice means subjecting her to boastful speeches). Both women flirt with all the men and boast to all the women. The owner of the hotel fawns over them, and they wear elaborate outfits dripping with jewels. They are wealthy, beautiful, voluptuous, and frivolous they have come to the hotel only in order to shop in the nearby boutiques. The guests who really capture Edith’s imagination are the Puseys: Iris and her daughter Jennifer. Neville, but she doesn’t get to know him. Edith notices a quiet, attractive businessman named Mr. Edith strikes up a friendship with Monica, who has been sent to the hotel by her husband he has ordered her to recover from her “eating disorder” so that she can have children, but she is making little effort to comply with his wishes. There is Madame de Bonneuil, who lives at the hotel permanently she has been expelled from her castle by her son and his wife. At first, Edith spends her time observing the other guests and describing them for David’s amusement. Resenting her banishment, Edith swears not to change. She has fallen into some kind of social disgrace that has caused her friends to send her away she is on “probation” until she can “grow up” and “be a woman.” It’s clear that Edith’s disgrace has something to do with her personal life fleeing an unsuccessful marriage, she spends much of her time at the hotel writing letters to David Simmonds, a married man with whom she is passionately in love. Edith is “a writer of romantic fiction under a more thrusting name.” We learn early on that her stay at the hotel is not entirely Edith’s own choice. The novel opens as Edith arrives at the titular hotel, a conservative, family-run establishment overlooking Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Pusey and her daughter Jennifer, and later receives a marriage proposal from Mr. She forms an uneasy friendship with the glamorous Mrs. Hotel du Lac (1984), a novel by British writer Anita Brookner, follows Edith Hope, a romance writer who has been banished from London in social disgrace, as she passes an enforced vacation in a Swiss hotel.

Novel hotel du lac