The Eye of the Storm was published by Jonathan Cape in London in 1973 — the same year White received the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is his most accessible major novel (by White’s demanding standards) and his most directly emotional: a study of dying, of family, and of the peculiar tyranny that powerful personalities exert even from their deathbeds.
Elizabeth Hunter is dying — eighty-six, bedridden, attended by nurses, visited by a corrupt solicitor and an unctuous housekeeper. She was, in life, a woman of extraordinary beauty, will, and selfishness: she dominated her husband (who died gratefully), her children (who fled to opposite ends of the earth), and every room she entered. Now, confined to her bed, she is reduced to memory — but even her memories are a form of domination: she relives, obsessively, a moment during a cyclone on a tropical island when she stood alone in the eye of the storm and experienced a transcendence she cannot name but knows was the summit of her life.
Her children have returned: Dorothy (now the Princesse de Lascabanes, married to a minor French aristocrat, the marriage a failure) and Basil (a famous actor, charming and hollow, perpetually in debt). They want her money. They want her dead. They cannot acknowledge either desire, and so they perform solicitude while scheming with the solicitor about the will.
White’s sympathy is, characteristically, with the dying tyrant rather than her victims: Elizabeth Hunter, for all her selfishness, lived fully — loved, desired, experienced. Her children, products of her neglect, have achieved only the appearance of life. The novel’s emotional weight comes from the recognition that some personalities are simply larger than others — and that this largeness is simultaneously a gift (to the possessor) and a catastrophe (to everyone around them).
Collecting The Eye of the Storm
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1973): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
First US edition (Viking, New York, 1974): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- Jonathan Cape first UK edition in dust jacket: $50–$150
- Viking first US edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Signed first edition: $150–$400
- Without jacket: $10–$25
Published in White’s Nobel year, making first editions particularly sought. Fred Schepisi’s 2011 film adaptation (starring Charlotte Rampling and Geoffrey Rush) renewed commercial interest.