![]() ![]() Who was Lucian, the 1st-century Roman governor whom the characters spend so much time discussing? His details don’t seem to match up to any historical Lucian of antiquity. Told with huge energy and studded with learned asides, the novel bowls along so merrily between salons, Schlosses, casinos and countryside that it takes a while for the reader’s doubts to creep in. ![]() ![]() Beginning in Berlin in 1872, it maps an unlikely tangle of adoration and influence between the German publisher Maximilian Duncker, a Prussian countess called Sophie von Hahn and the writer George Eliot, the “Sibyl” of the title, who had taken lodgings in Berlin to finish her novel Middlemarch. At first, Patricia Duncker’s Sophie and the Sibyl might be mistaken for conventional period fiction. ![]()
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