What happened in Jung’s office is not known; Jung deemed the analysis a failure and destroyed his records; Lucia’s own letters do not survive. But this almost mythic encounter is ripe for fictional exploration, and it is here that Annabel Abbs’s novel of Lucia’s life in Paris and Zurich begins. Unfortunately, her treatment of the brief but bitter engagement of analyst and dancer fails to bring either character to life.

The account of Lucia’s Paris years is similarly disappointing. The woman Shloss describes as a ‘scamp and sexual adventurer’ is depicted by Abbs as timid, sexually inexperienced, and childishly narcissistic. The love affairs she recounts play out like teen romances: her head spins, her heart throbs, and she obsessively rehearses her future married name. Lucia is plausibly sad but irredeemably dull. As for Jung, in Abbs’s hands he is peremptory, abrasive, and seemingly unqualified to hold a conversation, let alone conduct an analysis. Lucia dances and Lucia cries, but where is the quicksilver sprite who entered Finnegans Wake? And what was the nature of the burden she carried? These questions Abbs does not begin to answer.