This brilliant novel by Maggie Hemingway (1946-1993) offers a purely speculative glimpse into the love life of the British landscape painter Philip Wilson Steer (1860-1942). In the early summer of 1887, Philip arrives in Walberswick, on the Suffolk coast, as he had each year since completing his education, intending to use the time to sketch and paint. Also summering in Walberswick is Isobel Heatherington, who arrives with her three daughters, Sophie, Marie and Emma, to take up residence in Quay House. Isobel’s husband, preoccupied with business dealings, stays behind in London. Philip initially spots Isobel from a distance, in the company of her daughters, and is instantly smitten by the young woman’s delicate beauty and mournful air of vulnerability. Then, by chance, Philip meets the girls on the beach. This leads to an invitation to lunch, followed by further invitations to outings in the countryside. Ultimately, Philip becomes a fixture at Quay House and an intimate of the Heatherington family, which includes Isobel’s watchful Aunt Jude. The attraction between Isobel and Philip springs up quickly and soon develops into an ardent though unacknowledged passion, leaving them confused, heartsick, sleep-deprived and at war with forbidden urges. Isobel, bored with her marriage, emotionally detached from her husband, resents her position as someone who is under constant observation—whose every mood, gesture and stray glance is noted and discussed—and longs for even a moment of unfettered solitude to do as she pleases. Philip, emotionally reticent, devoted to his art, is a novice where love is concerned. However, he knows one thing for certain: that in Victorian England what he and Isobel feel for each other has the power to destroy them both. Maggie Hemingway tells her story from a variety of points of view, seamlessly and effortlessly moving from one to another, sometimes within a single scene. Hemingway’s sympathetic depiction of two people struggling against unruly desires to adhere to the oppressive moral restrictions of Victorian society is suspenseful and deeply moving. What elevates the book to triumphant near-classic status is Hemingway’s evocative, atmospheric prose, which endows the village of Walberswick and the natural beauty in which the characters are immersed with a bright immediacy that is often so vivid as to seem magical. The Bridge, the first of Maggie Hemingway’s four novels, won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and was adapted into a movie in 1992. ( )