I am as enchanted as anyone by beautiful, lyrical writing. Being able to evoke a place or create a unique character or capture the fluid nuances of dialogue is incredibly important in the best writing. But sometimes in the quest for this transcendent writing, authors do too much, taking their language from the sublime to the overdone. And sometimes the search for the perfect word or descriptive phrase is too evident and forced in the writing to make for easy and seamless reading. This was the case for me with Melissa Pritchard's novel, Palmerino.

Sylvia Casey is a writer. Her previous books were not enough of a success for her publisher to stay with her if she doesn't produce a blockbuster of sorts this time around. As if struggling professionally isn't enough, her husband of many years has recently left her for a man. She's come to Palmerino, an enclave in Italy just outside Florence, to recover personally and professionally as she researches the life of Violet Paget, a Victorian novelist best known for her supernatural stories under the pen name of Vernon Lee. Paget was a polymath, feminist, and lesbian who fully inhabited the created persona of Vernon Lee and Sylvia Casey wants to write a fictional biography of the not very well known author, hence her retreat to Palmerino, where Paget/Lee lived out much of her life.

The story has a triple stranded narration, telling the story of Sylvia and Violet/Vernon as well as the ghost of Vernon, who slowly creeps into Sylvia's consciousness before possessing her incrementally, in an intentional echo of Vernon's own writing. When the narration focuses on Sylvia, it centers on her writing, the lush, atmospheric place that Palmerino is, and her discoveries about the little known writer on whom she is growing increasingly fixed. The portion centered on Violet/Vernon tells a fairly straightforward biography of the writer, using her own diaries, letters, and the impressions of those around her, painting her as impressively intelligent, socially abrasive, scared of intimacy, and needy. When the spirit of Vernon narrates the tale, there is a sense of gathering menace and a disturbingly self-congratulatory feel in the pleased accounting of what she can make Sylvia write and do.

The narration gives the sensation of having a dreamy veil over it. Everything, whether necessary, tangential, or completely immaterial to the plot, is described in detail, giving the whole of it a florid and meandering feel. The pacing is slow and made for a very soporific read for me. The ending is a bit strange and otherworldly, another echo of the real Vernon Lee's work, but inevitable for all that. While I found the story a struggle to read, there are many glowing tributes to the book and the writing. Certainly the question of inspiration, research, and authorship, loneliness and connection, and the close link between this world and the spirit world are all present in the text but ultimately they don't seem to drive anything or to be examined fully in the course of the novel. In the end, the biggest irony for me is that Sylvia's manuscript, called Palmerino, is deemed unreadable. ( )

I received a copy of this book through the Early Reviewers program in exchange for an honest review.

Pritchard's Palmerino was a pleasant surprise for me. It's just under two hundred pages, and the blurb promises the story of a biographer being (literally?figuratively?) possessed by her subject. Although it starts slow, it successfully creates a lethargic atmosphere and fully realized setting. Pritchard bounces back and forth between Sylvia's (the biographer), historical Vernon's (the subject), and a ghostly Vernon's voice. Food and setting are so important, both to Sylvia's modern Italy and to Vernon's historical Italy. The details are sumptuous.

This is a mildly unsettling unraveling of reality, or perhaps a slow infiltration of a ghost into a full possession. The subtlety creates a more unnerving experience.

I enjoyed Palmerino and I believe I'll be reading more of Pritchard's books in the future. ( )

Joy's review: Most of our book group enjoyed this book much more that I did. I found it to be all atmosphere and no plot, point or action. But if you want to read lush descriptions of Italian gardens and dreamy descriptions of life in the 1900's, to for it. ( )

Sylvia is living in the Villa Il Palmerino, the former home of the writer Vernon Lee. She's there trying to recover from being left by her husband and to write a biography of Ms. Lee. The book goes back and forth between Sylvia's experience writing the book, and biographical pieces of Ms. Lee's life.

The writing is inventive and the use of language is creative with lovely descriptions of people and places. But I found the story to be disjointed and lacking in narrative coherence. I wanted to know more about Sylvia or Ms. Lee. Both of their stories seem to be incomplete with many questions left unanswered. There was a lack of depth to the characters and while the author brushes around the edges of Ms. Lee's sexuality, she seems almost afraid to really explore it and how it may have impacted Ms. Lee's life and writing. One thing this book did do is make me more curious about Vernon Lee, someone of whom I had never heard before. Unfortunately, I will now have to read a different book about her to satisfy that curiosity. ( )

Vernon Lee, or Violet Paget, was by all accounts an immensely gifted and intelligent English essayist, art critic and writer of ghost stories. Befriended and admired, if sometimes feared, by her peers Lee was one of the leading lights of the Aesthetic Movement. She counted Henry James and Oscar Wilde as friends. John Singer Sargent’s portrait of her bears a remarkable likeness to Wilde. She also was a lover of women and had passionate relationships with three.

Melissa Pritchard’s novel, Palmerino, tells the story of Lee's fictional biographer’s (Sylvia Casey) stay at Lee’s former home, the villa Palmerino in Florence, Italy, now a rental property. Saddled with problems, not the least of which is her husband’s abandoning her for another man, Sylvia struggles with the memory of her subject as well as her own memories and the residua of both of their lives.

Sylvia’s story becomes braided with Lee’s or at least with a certain period of Lee’s life when she falls in love with Kit Anstruther-Thomson. Lee comes to haunt Sylvia as her spirit watches over her, mirroring the writer’s supernatural work. Lee’s story eventually dominates as did the woman herself.

Praise on the back cover calls the novel a “jewel” and that it is. Short, dense and brilliant it dazzles, reflecting light on all of its characters. Perhaps too short to be considered a masterpiece this novella does approach perfection and shows Ms. Pritchard at the height of her powers. It will be interesting to see if she is honored with a prize in 2014 or later. I recommend this book highly. ( )