Title
The Heathen: A Novel,Used
Sold by Ergodebooks, an authorized reseller.
Returns accepted within 30 days | support@ergodebooks.com
Shipping Information
- Free Standard Shipping — United States only
- Processing Time: 1–3 business days
- Estimated Delivery: 3–5 business days after dispatch
- Double-boxed, fully insured & discreetly packaged
- Tracking number sent via email once dispatched
- Orders over $250 require signature upon delivery. Taxes calculated at checkout.
Returns & Refund
Returns accepted within 30 days of delivery.
Damaged or Defective Item
Free return shipping + replacement or full refund
Wrong Item Received
Free return shipping + replacement or full refund
Change of Mind
Return shipping at customer's expense · 25% restocking fee applies
Payment Option
Narcyza Zmichowska (181976) was the most accomplished female writer to come out of Poland in the midnineteenth century. In terms of influence and popularity, she was the George Eliot of East European letters, but her fiction was written less in the realist style than in the Romantic one. Her novel The Heathen, rendered here in a crystalline English translation by Ursula Phillips, is the tale of a doomed love affair between Benjamin, a young man from a poor but patriotic rural family, and Aspasia, a femme fatale who is older, beautiful, worldlier, and more sexually liberated.As the story unfolds, Benjamin falls in love with Aspasia, accompanies her to Warsaw, and under her influence achieves incredible intellectual and professional heightsuntil she tires of him and takes another lover. Jealous, Benjamin murders Aspasia's new paramour and flees to his mother in the countrysidewhere he realizes the full extent of what he has lost and betrayed. Hence the fundamental tension in this work, represented by the two women who compete for Benjamin's affection: the mother, who represents selfabnegation and redemption from sin, and Aspasia, who represents selfindulgence and sin itself.In the end, The Heathen embodies a profound meditation on the limits of these typecasts: the novel not only explores the restrictions they placed on women during the nineteenth century, but on human happiness, and Poland's then tenuous impulse toward modernity.
⚠️ WARNING (California Proposition 65):
This product may contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm.
For more information, please visit www.P65Warnings.ca.gov.