ABSTRACT
Florence Delay's work is both enjoyable and intellectually stimulating because she is a refined, if also exuberant, stylist who blends into her prose just the right potent doses of personal revelation, fictional elaboration, sophisticated stylistic imitation and jubilant historical research. Delay is witty and engaging, but her wit extends beyond mere entertainment and imparts philosophical import. She avows that she "demands a lot from literature", an extraordinary credo in our shallow age. She explains that literature really should uplift us, create in us a deep or transcendent joy. She thereby associates her aesthetics with the spiritual, as if writing and reading really could save us or at least offer us moments richer and more precious than those produced by real life. Such ideals represent the serious, almost grave, counterpoint to Delay's jaunty hymns to serendipity and happenstance. Her cheerfulness harbors uncommon profundities. Happiness depends, Delay suggests, on one's openness to happenstance—an attitude more difficult to adopt than one might expect.
