Romantic fiction is different from romance fiction, of course. If you want to see how different, may I recommend “Symphony” by Jude Morgan? It is a frustrating, moving and accurate portrait of the romance between Irish actress Harriet Smithson and the quixotic genius, Hector Berlioz. It is also the stuff of which Jane Austen made so much but on far higher level.

Berlioz’s family figures in the plot. His mother denounces him when he switches from medicine to music and his father is not pleased either. One can only imagine their feelings when Hector, besotted to the point of distraction, falls in love with rage of Paris, Miss Smithson, who knocks French audiences out with, first, her Ophelia and next her Juliet. The legendary characters of actors Kean and Kembel play a role in her life, but most of all, it is controlled by the fickle finger of fate. The finger writes “Revolution” and Shakespeare loses his panache, leaving Harriet to form her own company and struggle to regain audiences with a second rate troupe of actors. Enter Hector Berlioz, stage right.

Berlioz did not find much favor in Paris early in his career and he struggled to make ends meet by writing reviews of others’ concerts while he wrote his own music. Even winning the Prix de Rome, a contest he hated for its academic boundaries and cloistered environment, did not jump-start his career. His first major work as the “Symphonie fantastique,” dedicated to and inspired by Harriet. She is duped into going to its first performance and, like most of the rest of the audience, is shocked and dismayed by its raw energy and doleful finale in which “you can hear the head hit the basket.” She soon yields to his constant attention and they marry and have a son, Louis, to whom Berlioz is devoted.

Harriet, plumping up and no longer thinking of acting, begins to tilt the brandy bottle and it is not spoiling the story to mention that she goes mad as well. The novel opens with scenes of Harriet in Monsieur Blanche’s Asylum for Lunatics in Montmartre. The story of her life with Berlioz is spun out in the atmosphere of post-Waterloo France and it is, in a way, the story of most fine artists who are not recognized in their lifetimes. Berlioz eventually yields to Harriet’s growing insanity, somewhat perfunctorily takes a mistress and gets on with his life, finding some success in England and Germany, but never the rewards he deserved. The only quibble I find in the novel is the lack of the interesting and significant fact that he never learned to play piano (mentioned) but was a guitar virtuoso and, it is said, used the guitar to find harmonies while other composers used the piano. That is such a quirky turn that it deserved mention but we learn only that Berlioz did not play the piano and thus could not, like Chopin, make money by teaching the daughters of the rich.

Reading this novel is frustrating. If you have a musical collection at all, you will want to run to the CD player and load it up with Berlioz, Chopin, Schubert, Liszt and other composers mentioned in its pages. Most of all, however, you will mourn for an epic romance that sours and wonder what might have been had everyone been able to get along. A moving read.