In The Doll, Polish novelist Boleslaw Prus depicts a society where rank and money are everything, and sex has become little more than a subject for endless gossip, a human frailty everyone is subject to - yet condemned for! He presents one of the most striking portraits of a woman in fiction with Isabella Lecka, the daughter on an impoverished nobleman. Beautiful, capricious and beguiling, she is capable of causing men to come to ruin for her sake, for man's relation with her and her contemporaries is always a test of courage, an ordeal in which a man must triumph or perish.
This 1890 novel was submitted to Russian censorship in Warsaw before it was allowed to be published, and first published in English in 1973. The Doll portrays frivolous, pleasure-loving, idle, snobbish characters concerned with sexual intrigues, amusement, gambling and wasting time. Prus nevertheless portrays these characters seriously, and is concerned with the subtle relations between them, the tensions, and the conflicts of "civilized" society that make this book so relevant for our time.