An Imaginative Experience

A traveller on an InterCity train returning to London smells the\nburn of brakes as it hisses to a stop in the middle of the\ncountryside. He sees a white-faced woman leap from the train and\nrace to the aid of a sheep stranded on its back in a field, unable\nto rise. Righting it, the woman turns, and he sees her face is full\nof tragedy.

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Considering tragedies of his own, he does not intrude, but the\nimage lodges in his mind: a strange but familiar despair, unable,\ndespite itself, to ignore the desperation it recognizes in others.\nFrom these seeds Mary Wesley draws out a plot of an unforgettable\nimpact: of loss, of release, of a necessarily comic acceptance of\nfate, of love — “the imaginative experience.”

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Rich in character and wit, and powerfully moving, this is a\nnovel of the heart’s pain and deliverance.

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