Plot
Now aged fifteen Marianne returns to Brighton, where she recuperated from her illness at the end of Marianne Dreams, when she was ten. Much to her disappointment she finds Brighton a lonely and boring place, and she tags along with local girls Alice and Josie despite having little in common with them.
One evening Josie's friend Billie tells the girls of a visit to a local fortune teller who apparently gives remarkably accurate readings. Reluctantly, Marianne joins the girls on a trip to the fortune teller and there she is astonished at how much the woman guesses about her life, including details of her illness five years ago. The fortune teller assures Marianne that she will not be lonely for much longer and that soon she will experience romance.
Spurred on by this Marianne accepts a date with a boy called Alan, whom she doesn't realise is Billie's former boyfriend. This inadvertent betrayal alienates Marianne from the few friends she had, and after Alan also deserts her she is left on her own. It is then that she meets Mark, a boy from London who, it transpires, is the same boy with whom she shared a tutor but never met in Marianne Dreams. The two enjoy the last few days of the holiday together and promise to meet again in London.
Read more about this topic: Marianne And Mark
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“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
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—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)