Antonina

Antonina is a poignant account of a young Russian woman whose life is shaped by the cruel neglect of her stepparents, the financial ruin of her father and later her husband, and - the centerpiece of the novel - her failed love affair with a sensitive but weak young man. This work is a previously untranslated section of a four-volume novel, The Niece, published in Russia in 1851. Patterned after the successful contemporary novels of the Bronte sisters - in fact, Tur names one character after the town of Millcote in Jane Eyre - Antonina was praised by another great nineteenth-century writer, Ivan Turgenev. Jehanne Gheith addresses the novel's continuing appeal in her illuminating introduction.