This latest novel from Josephine Hart, her fourth, has the merit of being short. Frankly, it needs such advantages since the only other is a rather pretty dust cover. The story told is one of striking and self-conscious melodrama, the sort that begs for a latter-day Stella Gibbons to parody. Indeed, at times the reader is left with the thought that perhaps Hart has written the book as an extended joke, but sadly this is not the case. The plot may be synopsised as follows: our narrator, blessed with the euphonious - not to mention unbelievable - name of Bethesda Barnet, is an unmarried woman who lives with her semi-invalid aged mother in a small village. No specifics of time or place are given, but it is clear from various references in the text that the setting is England towards the close of the last century. BB has a suitor, a farmer called Samuel Keans and also an admirer, the local grandee, Lord Grantleigh, with whom she may/may not be conducting an affair. Hart might imagine she is teasing her audience by being oblique but this stylistic trick soon becomes merely tiresome. A simpler, and shorter, book would have resulted had she delivered the narrative in a more straightforward fashion.

Meanwhile, Miss Barnet, as she is called by other characters, falls in love with a new arrival in the village, Mathew Pearson, whose wife is heavily pregnant. Soon enough BB, being of artistic bent, is painting portraits of the beloved in her bedroom using a collection of mirrors as backdrops. Mrs Pearson comes to call on the Barnets mere et fille, ends up in the latter's bedroom and promptly drops down dead; a shard of mirror is hastily employed to perform a caesarean operation so that the baby may be saved. Circumstances become steadily stranger thereafter as BB is forced to flee the village and ends up in a remote island-based convent where she is renamed Sister Annunciata and terrorises all the other nuns.

Eventually, and not before one botched attempt which leaves her hideously scarred, she kills herself and brings the novel to a close. So persistently excessive are the emotions and so overwrought their explication, it is as though the silliest of English television soap operas such as Eastenders had been served up in bustle and frock coat. This is Ivy ComptonBurnett without the redeeming wit or Wilkie Collins devoid of any sense of mystery.

Here is a typical instance of the Hart prose style. "With passionless passion, I had pushed myself to an extreme. And when that extreme proved itself futile, I had pushed further." What can this possibly mean? Much of the book is written in the same fashion, full of portentous sentences which appear superficially impressive but soon prove to be striking only for their vacuousness. In addition to her acrobatic ways with the English language, BB is self-absorbed to a tedious degree, her creator unable to bestir the outside observer's interest in what we are, no doubt, meant to feel is her pitiful plight. Consider, by comparison, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea in which a somewhat similar female narrator - only eventually does it transpire she is the first Mrs Rochester of Jane Eyre - explains what has happened to bring her to insanity.

Rhys is fascinating in her ability to entrap the reader's sympathy, whereas Hart is incapable of creating even mild curiosity. She is the literary offspring of Elinor Glyn, constantly striving after effect at the expense of intelligibility. Sensationalism is Hart's metier, whether it be BB breathing heavily over the painted image of her inamorato or the equally tedious Lord Grantleigh tossing off sub-Wildean maxims such as "Your lack of will is your strength." Whichever of them, indifference can be the only possible response from the reader because Hart lacks the necessary skills to permit her story-telling to carry conviction. Plot and prose alike fail her and she is condemned to fall back on grotesque absurdity. This is a sad book because it is a silly book.