The Constant Nymph

The Constant Nymph is a poignant and unconventional love story that explores art, passion, and emotional innocence against the backdrop of bohemian Europe in the early 20th century.

The novel centers on Tessa Sanger, a sensitive and devoted teenage girl, one of the many children of Albert Sanger, a brilliant but eccentric and selfish composer who lives with his large, unruly family in the Austrian Tyrol. The Sangers live a chaotic, music-filled life in near-poverty but with great freedom-untamed by the conventions of polite society. Their home is often visited by artists and musicians who share Sanger's free-spirited ideals.

The Constant Nymph explores the tension between art and respectability, emotional truth and social convention. It contrasts the natural, instinctive life of the Sangers with the rigid, repressed world of English middle-class morality. Kennedy examines the price of passion and the tragic purity of love that cannot fit within the boundaries of society.