The Honeyed Peace
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Liana
The richest man on a Caribbean island marries a young mixed-race woman to settle a score, and neither side of the island will have her.
- 1944
About Martha Gellhorn
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeGellhorn's third novel, published while she was covering the war, is set on a French-held island in the Caribbean and turns on the marriage between the richest white man on the island and a young mixed-race woman. The war is a rumour offshore; the subject is the household, and the terms on which she is permitted to live in it. It is the book of hers that sits furthest from the reporting, and the one most concerned with a kind of confinement she never had to face herself.
The story, in more detail
The island is invented — Saint Boniface, a French possession in the Caribbean — and the household is the whole of the book. Marc Royer is the richest white man on it. Liana is a young mixed-race woman he marries largely to punish another woman who refused him, and the marriage installs her in a house where she is neither servant nor wife in any sense the island recognises. She has money, clothes and nothing to do, and no one on either side of the colour line will have her.
Pierre Vauclain arrives to teach at the school, displaced and shaken by the occupation of France. Marc, noticing a man who needs money and a wife who needs occupying, hires him to give Liana lessons in the afternoons. What the lessons become — reading, talk, swimming, picnics at the sea — is the only part of her life she chooses. The war is offshore throughout, a rumour on the radio, until it isn't.
The full plot
Marc Royer marries Liana to settle a score with a white woman who turned him down, and brings her into his house on Saint Boniface. She is cut off from the community she came from and refused by the one she has married into. Marc is possessive, easily humiliated, and increasingly punitive as it becomes clear that owning her has not delivered what he wanted.
The afternoon lessons with Pierre Vauclain give her the first thing in the book that is hers — books, conversation, the sea — and the two of them fall in love. Pierre is a Frenchman shaken by the fall of his country, and the affair runs against his sense of what he ought to be doing with the war on.
How it ends — spoilers ahead
Pierre decides to leave the island and join the war effort, and reassures himself that Marc will look after her in his absence. He is wrong about that. With Pierre gone and the marriage closing around her again, Liana kills herself. The novel does not present the death as a tragedy of love; it presents it as the arithmetic of a woman with no legal, social or economic way out of a house, and the war that carried Pierre off is the same war that made the rest of the book look small while it was happening.
Why we recommend it
The furthest she got from reporting
No dispatch, no war, no correspondent surrogate. It is the clearest look at what she could do when she invented everything.
A confinement she never had to live
Gellhorn spent her life leaving. The novel is about a woman who cannot, which is a strange and interesting thing for her to have written.
Published mid-war
It came out in 1944, between Spain and Normandy, which tells you something about how hard she worked.
What this book explores
The people in its pages
Liana
The young woman the novel is named after. She is sixteen when the richest white man on the island takes her into his house, and he marries her some years later.
Marc Royer
The richest white man on Saint Boniface, and the most disliked. He marries Liana partly to punish the woman who would not marry him.
Pierre Vauclain
The schoolteacher, posted from occupied Paris to a French island with no part in the war. Marc pays him to give Liana lessons.
Also in the book
Marie
Marc's brother's widow, and the woman he wanted to marry. Her refusal is the reason he marries Liana.
Lucie
Liana's mother. She farms a hillside plot Marc Royer bought for her, and she settles the terms of her daughter's marriage.
Lucien Pinelli
An incomer from Guadeloupe who married the Mayor's daughter. He is the man who tells the island about Liana and the schoolteacher.
Timeline
1942
Reporting U-boat warfare across the Caribbean for Collier's, Gellhorn takes in the colonial island world that becomes the novel's Saint Boniface.
1944
Scribner's publishes Liana in the middle of the war, between Spain and Normandy; it climbs the New York Times list — the only bestseller of her career.
1987
Virago Modern Classics reissues it, carrying its colonial-marriage drama to a new generation.
Book editions
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Charles Scribner's Sons
- 1944
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Liana: frequently asked questions
Who wrote Liana?
Martha Gellhorn. It was her third novel, published in 1944 while she was covering the Second World War.
What is Liana about?
Set on an invented French-held Caribbean island, Saint Boniface, it turns on the marriage between the richest white man on the island and a young mixed-race woman, Liana. The war is only a rumour offshore; the subject is the household.
What are its themes?
Race, marriage, and power within a single household, on a colonial island cut off from the war around it.
Is the island real?
No. Saint Boniface is invented — a French Caribbean possession Gellhorn created for the novel.
When was it written?
During the Second World War, while Gellhorn was reporting it — which is why the war stays at the edges of the book.