Book Description

One of the most audacious of all modernist novels. Millicent, Lady Cheseborough -- fifty, widowed, rejected by her much younger lover -- lies dying in a nursing home, the victim of a stroke. As she nears death, her thoughts go back through her life in a desperate attempt to find its meaning. Millicent is a woman who has never been fully sure of herself. We see her as a child asking her nanny why she has to live within her body. We see her as a young woman wondering how any eligible bachelor will take an interest in her. We see her as the wife of an older, assured man upon whom she becomes dependent. We suffer with her as a gigolo seduces her, wastes her money, and abandons her. And we feel ourselves with her as she struggles to be understood through her stroke and disorientation. As was her trademark, Gertrude Trevelyan takes us deeper into the mind of her subject than almost any novelist ever attempted, creating an intense and absorbing reading experience. With great stylistic daring, Gertrude Trevelyan recreates the stream of consciousness in its most realistic and moving form. As It Was in the Beginning is perhaps Trevelyan's most important work, a novel that belongs with To the Lighthouse or As I Lay Dying.