Pierre; or The Ambiguities

Pierre Glendinning is the 19-year-old heir to the manor at Saddle Meadows in upstate New York. Engaged to the blonde Lucy Tartan in a match approved by his domineering mother Pierre encounters the dark and mysterious Isabel Banford who claims to be his half sister the illegitimate and orphaned child of his father and a European refugee. Driven by his magnetic attraction to Isabel Pierre devises a remarkable scheme to preserve his father's name spare his mother's grief and give Isabel her proper share of the estate. First published in 1852 Pierre; or the Ambiguities was condemned by critics of the time: a dead failure this crazy rigmarole and a literary mare's nest. Latter-day critics however have recognized in the story of Melville's idealistic young hero a corrosive satire of the sentimental Gothic novel and a revolutionary foray into modernist literary techniques.