Harriet Cohen - Cohen in Novels

Cohen in Novels

Harriet Cohen was portrayed in three novels. D. H. Lawrence based the main character of Harriet in his novel Kangaroo on Cohen. Kangaroo was first published in 1923 and is set in Australia.

Rebecca West based the main character of Harriet in her novel Harriet Hume (1929) on Harriet Cohen. The novel is described as a modernist story about a piano-playing prodigy and her obsessive lover, a corrupt politician. The novel immortalised Harriet's love affair with the composer Arnold Bax.

William Gerhardie cast Cohen as the heroine Helen Sapphire in the book Pending Heaven and much of what is written mirrors Cohen's own life and character as well as her turbulent relationship with Gerhardie. Helen Sapphire is a musician who performs successfully all over Europe. She plays the harp and the piano. Gerhardie personified himself in the central character of Max who dreams about Helen.

Read more about this topic:  Harriet Cohen

Famous quotes containing the words cohen and/or novels:

    Adults understandably assume that the level of verbal proficiency a five-year-old displays represents his level of proficiency in all areas of functioning—if he talks like an adult, he must think and feel like one. However, five-year-olds,... belie the promise of adult-like behavior with their child-like, impulsive actions.
    —Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)

    Fathers and Sons is not only the best of Turgenev’s novels, it is one of the most brilliant novels of the nineteenth century. Turgenev managed to do what he intended to do, to create a male character, a young Russian, who would affirm his—that character’s—absence of introspection and at the same time would not be a journalist’s dummy of the socialistic type.
    Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)