Justine was published by Faber and Faber in 1957, the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet — one of the most ambitious formal experiments in post-war English fiction and the work that established Durrell as a major novelist after decades of marginal recognition.
The narrator, Darley, is an impoverished writer living on a Greek island (identified in later volumes as the island from Durrell’s Prospero’s Cell), reconstructing his love affair with Justine Hosnani — a beautiful, damaged Jewish woman married to a wealthy Coptic banker — in Alexandria during the 1930s. The city is as much a character as any person: Durrell’s Alexandria is a palimpsest of civilizations, a crossroads of East and West, a place where identity is unstable and truth is refracted through multiple lenses of culture, language, and desire.
The novel’s prose is famously lush — sensuous, metaphor-rich, incantatory — drawing on French Symbolist poetry and the Arabic literary tradition as much as English fiction. Every scene is saturated with sensory detail: the smell of jasmine and sewage, the quality of Mediterranean light, the textures of silk and skin. This is deliberate: Durrell’s Alexandria is known through the body as much as the mind.
But the novel’s deepest innovation is structural: Darley’s account — passionate, self-serving, incomplete — will be revealed in subsequent volumes as profoundly unreliable. What he understands as a love affair is also a political conspiracy; what he interprets as passion may be manipulation; and the Justine he constructs from memory may bear little relation to the woman who actually existed.
Collecting Justine
First edition (Faber and Faber, London, 1957): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $150–$500
- Signed first edition: $400–$1200
- US first (Dutton, 1957): $50–$150
- Without jacket: $30–$60