Books in Brief: Lord Elgin’s Lady

Lord Elgin’s Lady, by Theodore Vrettos (Houghton Mifflin, 363 pp., $11.95). This is the story of a man and a woman driven by hubris and brought down by nemesis, and properly so, for it was the monomaniacal arrogance of Thomas Bruce, Seventh Earl of Elgin, that led him to rape the Parthenon of those marble carvings that now bear his name, and it was that action, his wife came to believe, that helped ruin his marriage and impoverish him. The whole story is here in this moving novel, rooted in history with no violation of the main facts. We see that moment in history through the eyes of Mary Nesbit, who at 19 married the 32-year-old laird and accompanied him to Turkey, where he was the Minister Plenipotentiary of His Britannic Majesty to the Sublime Porte. Whatever the rights and wrongs of it may be, this post gave him a firman to pretty much take what he wanted, and take it he did. The collection of Greek antiquities and particularly the Parthenon reliefs became an obsession with Elgin, and he had them torn from the temple, as disease rotted the nose from his face. As the obsession intensified and the nasal wound worsened, Mary Nesbit’s devotion waned. The death of their fourth child in infancy while they were interned in Napoleon’s France was a shattering blow to Mary, and her consolation came in the form of Robert Fergusson, a handsome scholar. A charge of adultery followed, a scandalous trial in Scotland, Elgin’s impoverishment when the English government offered him half what the marbles had cost him. Nemesis brought him at the end to abject poverty in France. Melina Mercouri, who has been clamoring for the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece, might well distribute this novel throughout Europe if it weren’t more a story of love ruined by obsession.

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Herbert A. Kenny

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Lord Elgin’s Lady, by Theodore Vrettos (Houghton Mifflin, 363 pp., $11.95). This is the story of a man and a woman driven by hubris and brought down by nemesis, and properly so, for it was the monomaniacal arrogance of Thomas Bruce, Seventh Earl of Elgin, that led him to rape the Parthenon of those marble carvings that now bear his name, and it was that action, his wife came to believe, that helped ruin his marriage and impoverish him. The whole story is here in this moving novel, rooted in history with no violation of the main facts. We see that moment in history through the eyes of Mary Nesbit, who at 19 married the 32-year-old laird and accompanied him to Turkey, where he was the Minister Plenipotentiary of His Britannic Majesty to the Sublime Porte. Whatever the rights and wrongs of it may be, this post gave him a firman to pretty much take what he wanted, and take it he did. The collection of Greek antiquities and particularly the Parthenon reliefs became an obsession with Elgin, and he had them torn from the temple, as disease rotted the nose from his face. As the obsession intensified and the nasal wound worsened, Mary Nesbit’s devotion waned. The death of their fourth child in infancy while they were interned in Napoleon’s France was a shattering blow to Mary, and her consolation came in the form of Robert Fergusson, a handsome scholar. A charge of adultery followed, a scandalous trial in Scotland, Elgin’s impoverishment when the English government offered him half what the marbles had cost him. Nemesis brought him at the end to abject poverty in France. Melina Mercouri, who has been clamoring for the return of the Elgin Marbles to Greece, might well distribute this novel throughout Europe if it weren’t more a story of love ruined by obsession.