Ecstasy is the story of young widow roused out of the torpor of her solitude by a dalliance with a courtly womanizer. It is written in a dreamily impressionistic style whose primary concern is to capture its heroine's eternally shifting moods at their most ineffable and ephemeral. This title is not just glibly rhetorical. The heroine and her suitor never consummate their passion never even exchange so much as a kiss; ecstasy is all. Louis Couperus was a prolific and cosmopolitan writer whose work has been compared to that of Thomas Hardy