Available Formats
Reflections in a Golden Eye
By (Author) Carson McCullers
Penguin Books Ltd
Penguin Classics
15th July 2025
17th April 2025
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Classic fiction: general and literary
813.52
Paperback
160
Width 110mm, Height 180mm, Spine 9mm
99g
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books On a military base in 1930s Georgia, Private Ellgee Williams catches sight of his captain's wife in the nude and becomes obsessed with her. But Captain Penderton - unhappily married to the unfaithful Leonora - in turn erotically fixates on Williams. Spare, muscular and sensual, with the dramatic vision of a Greek myth, Carson McCullers' novella is a timeless work about the alienation of forbidden desire.
Carson McCullers was born in 1917. She is the critically acclaimed author of several popular novels in the 1940s and '50s, including The Member of the Wedding (1946). Her novels frequently depicted life in small towns of the southeastern United States and were marked by themes of loneliness and spiritual isolation. McCullers suffered from ill health most of her adult life, including a series of strokes that began when she was in her 20s; she died at the age of 50. The Member of the Wedding was dramatized for the stage in the 1950s and filmed in 1952 and 1997. Other films based on her books are Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967, with Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando), The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1968, starring Alan Arkin) and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1991).