Spider

The Legend has been spun…

Richard Adam was once a famous pianist and composer – and when he died, his last wife, Jacoba, devotes her life to his eternal memorial.

To cement her once husband’s ‘immortality’, she turns Edengarde into both Richard’s final resting place and as a museum dedicated to him.

Jacoba also writes The Biography.

In it, she writes herself to be the only one whom Richard ever truly loved, the muse Richard always sought: the perfect wife and mother to the perfect pianist. 

All his former lovers and even former wife, Babette, are reduced to trifling little affairs and common ‘sluts’.

Despite her ruthlessness, Jacoba’s theatrics work and the ‘Legend’ of Richard Adam is revered as sacred fact.

While Jacoba and Richard had children, all of them proved useless to Jacoba – only perhaps useful in creating the Legend.

However, there is her granddaughter, Daniela ‘Dendy’ Champion.

She doesn’t believe that her grandfather would want any of the theatrical idolatry he has since received from the world.

Sent away to an English boarding school – against Jacoba’s wishes – Dendy allows herself to forget Edengarde and embrace her ‘Englishness’.

But as her schooling come to an end, Dendy is confused and torn about her life; torn between her French and English sides.

Torn between loyalty to her grandmother and the Legend, and perhaps the reality Jacoba sought to bury.

When she returns to Edengarde, the annual Richard Adams Festival is being prepared and this year, she must host it in her grandmother’s place.

And there, she meets the up-coming pianist, Guy Renault…

Spider is a gripping tale of deception and the nature of truth, loyalty and even romance.

‘Miss Steen is a superb manipulator of scene, and she makes her places as alive as her people’ - Daily Telegraph

‘Rich and enjoyable’ - The Observer

‘fine scenes and piquant portraits’ - The Sunday Times

‘a vivid narrative’ - Manchester Guardian 

‘full of colour and character’ - John o' London's Weekly 

‘rich, lavish, violent, passionate’ -Evening News 

Marguerite Steen (12 May 1894 – 4 August 1975) was a British writer. Very much at home among creative people, she wrote biographies of the Terrys, of her friend Hugh Walpole, of the 18th century poet and actress (and sometime mistress to the Prince of Wales) Mary 'Perdita' Robinson, and of her own lover, the artist Sir William Nicholson. Her first major success was Matador,for which she drew on her love of Spain, and of bullfighting. Also a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic was her massive saga of the slave-trade and Bristol shipping, The Sun Is My Undoing. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1951.