Strange Fits of Passion was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1991, Shreve’s first novel. The title comes from Wordsworth — “Strange fits of passion have I known: / And I will dare to tell” — and the epigraph announces the novel’s central concern: the irrational intensity of feeling, both love and violence, and the difficulty of putting such experiences into language.
Maureen English is a New York magazine editor married to Harrold, a successful journalist who beats her. She flees with her baby daughter to a coastal Maine village in winter, taking refuge in a cottage and gradually building a relationship with Jack Strout, a local lobsterman. The narrative is told retrospectively by a journalist, Helen, who pieces together the story years later through interviews, letters, and her own investigation — a structure that fragments the chronology and forces the reader to reconstruct events the way one reconstructs any private catastrophe: from the outside, imperfectly, with gaps.
The Maine setting is essential — the isolation, the cold, the ocean’s indifference — and Shreve writes it with the precision of someone who knows that landscape is never neutral. The fishing village is both sanctuary and trap: it hides Maureen from her husband but also confines her. When Harrold finds her (as the reader knows from the beginning he will), the collision between past violence and present peace is devastating precisely because it has been inevitable from page one.
Collecting Strange Fits of Passion
First edition (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1991): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $40–$100
- Very good/very good: $15–$40
- Signed: $75–$200