Trilby

**A Singer Falls Under the Power of Svengali**

**The Novel That Became a Worldwide Cultural Craze**

**Bohemian Paris, Hypnosis, Celebrity, and Control**

**The Forgotten Bestseller That Left a Word in the Dictionary**

*Before the celebrated masterpieces came Trilby: an early work in which George du Maurier's defining concerns were already taking shape.*

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Trilby entered literary history as a work once visible enough to shape popular taste, yet now often remembered only at the edges of the canon.

Trilby is a sensation novel by George du Maurier and one of the most popular novels of its time. Published serially in Harper's New Monthly Magazine from January to August 1894, it was published in book form on 8 September 1894 and sold 200,000 copies in the United States alone. Trilby is set in the 1850s in an idyllic bohemian Paris. Though Trilby features the stories of two English artists and a Scottish artist, one of the most memorable characters is Svengali, a rogue, masterful musician and hypnotist. Trilby, the novel's heroine, is a young orphan girl working in Paris as an artist's model and laundress; all the men in the novel are in love with her. The relationship between Trilby and Svengali forms only a small, though crucial, portion of the novel, which is mainly an evocation of a milieu.

Three British art students in Paris (Talbot Wynne, called "Taffy", a distant heir to a baronetcy; Sandy McAlister, the Laird of Cockpen; and William Bagot, alias "Little Billee") meet musicians Svengali and Gecko and the artist's model and laundress Trilby O'Ferrall. Trilby is cheerful, kind-hearted, bohemian, and tone-deaf: "Svengali would test her ear, as he called it, and strike the C in the middle and then the F just above, and ask which was higher; and she would declare they were both the same". To the bemusement of the other characters, Trilby is unable to sing "Ben Bolt" in tune. The Brits and Trilby become friends. Svengali tries to persuade Trilby to let him train her voice, but she finds him repulsive and even frightening. She and Little Billee fall in love but his scandalized relatives get her to promise to leave him. She leaves Paris with her little brother, who later dies of scarlet fever. Trilby then falls under Svengali's influence. He hypnotises her and transforms her into a diva, La Svengali. Under his spell, Trilby becomes a talented singer, performing always in an amnesiac trance. Five years later, Little Billee is a famous painter. He, the Laird and Taffy recognise Trilby as she performs at a concert. Trilby sings beautifully but does not appear to be in good health.

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*“. To the bemusement of the other characters, Trilby is unable to sing ”*

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**Why Trilby Still Matters**

Read today, Trilby offers more than the curiosity of a famous writer's beginning. It preserves the risks, experiments, and unresolved tensions of a literary voice before later success made that voice familiar.

*Return to the beginning, and discover how Trilby first opened the path ahead.*