

Originally serialized in Harper's Monthly in 1894, Trilby was published with 120 illustrations by the author (who was also a celebrated caricaturist for Punch). As it turns out, however, her talent and her possession of her own mind have become dependent on Svengali maintaining his spell over her. Differences in social class doom their romance, but Trilby, taught by the mysterious hypnotist Svengali to sing like "some enchanted princess" becomes a famous entertainer. Billee, an English artist living the Bohemian life abroad, meets and falls in love with Trilby, a Parisian model.

Du Maurier had spent a good deal of his life as a child and later as an art student in Paris when he turned from his career in journalism and magazine illustration to novel writing he found enormous success with a novel divided as his own life had been between Paris and London. Du Maurier's Trilbywas the novel sensation of the 1890s.
