"YOU women are always so sentimental!" said the Philosopher. "You overdo the thing. You carry every emotion to an extreme limit. It shows a lamentable lack of judgment." In the long, tranquil spring of 1914, we find a poignant prelude to a vanishing world. in a sun-dappled English garden, a battle of heart and mind begins. He is the Philosopher-a older man of cool reason and cynical wit, who dismisses love as a foolish overindulgence. She is his gentle but spirited companion, a young woman whose depth of feeling finds wonder in a blooming rose and mourns the fate of a fallen robin. Their conversation is a delicate duel. He scorns her sentimentality; she meets his intellectual pride with quiet conviction. But just as the Philosopher finds his own disciplined heart threatened by the very emotion he claims to disdain, a rival emerges in the form of a young, impoverished engineer. This intimate conflict between head and heart soon becomes a fierce love triangle, as the engineer's simple practicality and sincere emotion offer a compelling alternative to the Philosopher's detached theories, tearing the Sentimentalist's heart in two. The intimate duel between head and heart, logic and sentiment, mirrors the larger tensions that would shatter global peace as World War I begins, forcing the Philosopher to an unexpected moment of reckoning and grace. Marie Corelli was the greatest bestseller of the Victorian period, outselling contemporaries like HG Wells, Jules Verne, and Arthur Conan Doyle put together. Detested by the critical press and loved by the public, this book was written a year before she died, in a world ever-changed from the one that brought her to fame.
