The Lost Prince by Selden Edwards

“The Little Book” was the best novel that I read in 2012, and it was Selden Edwards first novel. Now he has a second, “The Lost Prince.” I wrote gushing praise about his first novel and there was no way his second could live up to that, and it didn’t quite get to that same lofty level. “The Lost Prince” provides the backstory to “The Little Book,” it’s a parallel story, and it’s a fore story, as well. You’ll have to read his first book to understand that characterization. As a great fan of the first novel, I’m glad I read this second one. With many other authors, you can start in the middle of a sequence of books which stand alone, but this new novel does not stand by itself. Do yourself a favor and read “The Little Book,” and then dive into this one.

Eleanor Burden is the protagonist, and the story dates back to the late 1890s when her husband performed in the first modern Olympic Games in 1896. Eleanor led a secret life in which she kept secrets from her husband, with regard to her own investments that were spectacular, her intellectual pursuits, and especially with regard to her relationship with Arnauld Esterhazy. It their relationship which propelled this drama. And, there were remarkable other secrets. Her godfather was William James, and in this story, she had contact both with Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Edwards explained some of the differences that led to the split in Freud-Jung relationship. The author created a conversation between Burden and Jung in which Jung said of Freud, “In time our differences became impossible to conceal. I could no longer pretend to accept, for one, that human motivation is exclusively sexual, and I could not accept, for another, that the unconscious mind is entirely personal and peculiar to the individual.” Jung said, “To me, the very notion of psychic energy, libido as Freud calls it, cannot be wholly sexual. To me, libido is a more generalized ‘life force,’ of which sexuality is but one part.” Another important character, Will Honeycutt, said to Jung, “The human mind cannot stand randomness, don’t you see? Randomness makes one distraught. It means that anything can happen…. Randomness is insanity.” Edwards then took the reader into a brief explanation of Jung’s concept of “the collective unconscious.”

Much of the action in this book took place at the end of World War I, when the Austro-Hungarian empire came tumbling down. The descriptions of the physical and emotional wounds from the war were impressive, and I learned more about WWI history than I had known before. After Jung failed in the task, it was the character of Will Honeycutt, a Harvard physicist turned financier who took on the task of curing Esterhazy from his “shell shock,” the old term for PTSD. The quality of Edward’s writing and especially his character development are impressive. My advice: read Selden Edwards.