A portrait of the fin de siècle in all its morbid decadence
Everyone I have met who has read Belchamber, Howard Sturgis’s novel of 1904, would endorse Edith Wharton’s judgment that this was a book which was ‘very nearly in the first rank’. I can still vividly remember the week – half a lifetime ago – when my wife and I discovered the little blue World’s Classics edition in a secondhand bookshop and were lost to the world for days. It is Henry James with the gloves off – in some ways quite unbearably vivid. Country house adultery and the sexual mores of London society during the 1890s are upsettingly, even crudely, laid bare. ‘Sainty’ the English aristocrat, an aesthete whose favourite
