Our Wonderful Selves

A delicate, restless young man rejects suburban complacency after an inspiring encounter with a charismatic relative and resolves to remake his life and surroundings. The narrative follows his early experiments in taste and rebellion at home, then moves through travel, creative ambition, romantic complication, and attempts at public artistic expression. Episodes range from domestic reform to a spell abroad and efforts on the stage and in letters, observing with irony and sympathy the tensions between aspiration and habit, the awkwardness of self-fashioning, and the costs and consolations of pursuing an aesthetic life.