I tried, I really did. But at 200 pages I gave up the ghost. I'm not willing to blame this on the book - I love Donne's poetry but had little interest in reading about his romance with Anne. I didn't mind Pegge and was intrigued by her story enough to persist, but that's interrupted in the middle by the Romance between John and Anne. I ditched at page 200.

I think that in a different head space this book could be real fun. ( )

Conceit is Mary Novik's fantasia on the life and poetry of John Donne. As any English major has been taught, Donne's literary output divides itself between the erotic and satiric poetry of Jack Donne, the rake, and his later self, John Donne, the Dean of St. Paul's, poet of the Holy Sonnets and renowned sermonizer.

Personally, I have always been fondest of Jack -- poet of "The Flea," "To His Mistress Going to Bed," and "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" while admiring the Dean's "Death Be Not Proud" and "Batter My Heart" ( see Poets.org: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/243)

Novik's historical novel, while focusing mainly on the viewpoint of Donne's next-to-youngest daughter Pegge (Margaret), jumps in and out of the consciousnesses of Pegge; her dead mother, Ann More; her husband William, Samuel Pepys, Izaak Walton, and Donne himself. Pegge, who cared for her father as he died, proves to be far less interested in his religious concerns than his relationship with her mother and his secular poetry -- especially as it relates to her own personal relationships.

This is not a Hilary Mantel historical novel, steeped in details and much research, but Novik has done her research. It's a literary tour-de-force -- playing with Donne's words, poetry and the milieu of 17th c. England. While granting its probable historical shortcomings, I found it quite delightful. Recommended for those who have at least a passing interest in and knowledge of Donne's poetry and life. ( )

http://www.monniblog.com/2008/07/conceit/ ( )

There is a certain eternalness about the characters who are carved so sharply, so beautifully from the words that flow together as poetry. This was a beautiful book – it is a classic. And I am entirely enamored by the world created by Novik. The story of Pegge, who might have been Cinderella in some other story, who dreams and wants as feverishly as her genius father. Her genius has no audience, and her desires are largely unspoken. However, at the end of it all, she finds fulfillment. And love. ( )

Conceit is the story of Pegge, daughter of the poet John Donne, a woman obsessed with the desire to understand and experience true passion--the kind of passion expressed in the erotic poems her father penned in his youth. Pegge barely remembers her mother, who died giving birth to her twelfth child, and her father, now Dean of St. Paul's, has striven to suppress both his poems and his passion as he approaches death.

While there is much to admire in Conceit, it is not without its flaws. Mary Novik has obviously conducted extensive research into seventeenth-century London, including its architecture, history, society, family life, and literature. For the most part, these details are effortlessly woven into her fine prose. Oddly, in a book featuring John Donne, Isaak Walton, and Samuel Pepys, the literary allusions themselves seemed stilted. One example: when Pegge's husband William shares a cup of sack with Pepys, the latter's conversation is peppered with the coded sexual language familiar to readers of his diary. While I haven't read a biography of Pepys, I doubt that he used this code in conversation with persons who would not have understood it all; and in flirting with a tavern maid, he certainly would have expressed his desires in more forthright terms. It came across to me rather like a rap on the head (as if to say, "It's Pepys, you know? The sex-crazed guy who wrote about his adventure in a coded diary"). Since Pepys is one of our greatest sources of the details of London life in his day, including the Great Fire that launches Conceit, he might have been put to better use. Lines from Donne's poetry, of course, are central to the story, but they sometimes came up at odd moments and, again, tended to distract the reader. But since Pegge's obsessions are the novel's focus, this is more forgiveable.

Overall, the characters and relationships are certainly original, engaging, and well-developed. Pegge's love/hate relationship with her father, who she nurses towards death while still a teenager, haunts the rest of her life. A physical late-bloomer, she obsesses over her "fleurs" (menstruation), a habit that continues through her childbearing years and on into menopause. When she marries William Bowles, she brings with her the bed in which her parents made love and in which her father died. Her own efforts at penning passion are scrawled across the pages of her father's biography, pompously written by Isaak Walton, the object of her own first (and perhaps undying) love. As Pegge's behavior becomes more and more strange, her memories of Donne border on the incestuous and become confused with her marital relationship. Pegge's rivalry with her sister Con, her obsession with Walton, and her husband's gentle, loving concern are all brilliantly rendered here.

I have to admit that I was rather offput by seeing my beloved Donne presented as a self-centered hypochondriac; I am not sure if this is Novik's invention or recorded fact. However, the chapters that flash back to his courtship of and early marriage to Ann More redeem him. Structurally, the novel moves back and forth through time--a ragged structure but one appropriate to Pegge's thought processes. We even hear the voice of Ann Donne, come from the grave to accuse her husband of abandoning his promises.

On the whole, Conceit fully engaged me in Pegge's world, and I would recommend it to anyone who loves historical novels that are intellectually challenging. It's also a wonderful study of the complexities of the father-daughter relationship. As has been mentioned by others, it is hard to get ahold of a copy in the US, although the book was critically acclaimed and a strong seller in Canada. I had to wait a long time before I found a copy. It was worth the wait. ( )