History and Fantasy in The True Heart

Abstract

The essay argues that Warner’s 1929 novel The True Heart explores the possibility of feminist fantasy within the context of historical realism. It considers the pressures exerted on the protagonist Sukey Bond by the constraints implicit within historical, classical, and religious contexts, and looks in particular at the gender implications of the novel’s debt to Apuleius’s narrative of Cupid and Psyche. The essay compares the ideas of emancipation in The True Heart with those in its predecessor Lolly Willowes.