It’s 1863. The daughter of the most famous writer in the world, Victor Hugo, suddenly leaves her family’s home on the Channel Islands bound for Nova Scotia. She is in pursuit of a young British soldier, with whom she is desperately in love, but who has rejected her. Eight years later, after stalking him to the Caribbean, where he’s stationed with the army, Adele Hugo is brought back to Paris by a benevolent former slave woman who has taken pity on her. She is admitted to an asylum where she dies decades later, rich from the inheritance of the rights to her father’s books. This story of hopeless love has inspired writers, composers, and a well-known film by Francois Truffaut. Yet much about Adele Hugo’s tragic life has remained shrouded in mystery – not least the true character and identity of the soldier who ultimately contributed to her undoing. Mark Bostridge has been obsessed by Adele’s story for his entire adult life. Now he sets out in pursuit of the truth about her, travelling halfway across the world, acting as sleuth and tracking down the descendants of the soldier she loved. In so doing he recognises the source of his fascination with the aspects of Adele’s life that reflect and parallel his own. The result is a moving book about the pain of loving too much and of parents loving too little; about the ways in which we are haunted by the dead; and about our insatiable appetite for other’s people’s stories which possess us and invade our own lives. In Pursuit of Love is part memoir and part travelogue, as well as an invigorating new approach to the writing of biography.
