The Early Life of Stephen Hind by Storm Jameson (Harper & Row, 1966)
The Early Life of Stephen Hind is a novel about a beautiful, charming, intelligent, and ambitious young man rising in society, set in London in 1963.
Stephen Hind’s mother is a whorish clairvoyant and all he wants is to escape her tawdry and dirty world and become part of the upper class. A job as a secretary to Lord Chatteney, who is writing his memoirs, allows Stephen to enter this world, and his rise is swift: he becomes the boy toy of the elegant and accomplished Collette Hyde, who is married to the best publisher in London, enters a cordial marriage of convenience with a beautiful and wealthy women who is pregnant with a bastard, and sets his sights on a leggy Philadelphia steel heiress.
The main plot revolves around the completion and publication of Lord Chatteney’s memoir — he is considered a great man and his memoirs are heralded as a great work of literature. Both of these claims seem inflated to raise the stakes, but the novel is an entertaining and interesting look at a transitional time in England, when class distinctions were becoming more fluid and the old world was giving way to a more youthful culture.
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