Rhine Journey

Rhine Journey is Ann Schlee's novel, first published in 1980 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize the following year. It is set during a steamboat excursion along the Rhine in the summer of 1851. Charlotte Morrison, an unmarried woman travelling with her brother and sister-in-law, meets a fellow passenger, Edward Newman, and the encounter unsettles the carefully composed, respectable life she has built for herself. Over the course of the journey, Schlee explores the gulf between Charlotte's outward propriety and the intense feeling she has long kept hidden, asking whether two people can meaningfully fall in love knowing they will be parted again within days. Admired on publication for its exceptionally controlled, evocative prose, the novel remains a quietly devastating study of longing, repression and a life not fully lived.