Year of manufacture: 2012
Category: Biography
Publisher: Virago Press
English language
Format: PDF / RTF
Pages: 153 + 46 illustrations
ISBN: 978-1-84408-793-8
Nancy Durrell has always been an enigma. To her husband Lawrence, future author of The Alexandria Quartet, she was his introduction to bohemian London, his companion during his formative years and the inspiration for some of his finest poetry. He was devastated when she left him. To Anaïs Nin she was a mystery, famous for her quiet reserve. To Henry Miller she was a friend and fellow artist. To Joanna Hodgkin she was simply Mum – quirky, wise and quite unlike her friends’ mothers.
Here at last is Nancy’s story. Growing up in a dysfunctional family, weighed down with secrets, the introverted provincial schoolgirl was transformed overnight into a haunting beauty. From the smoky pubs of 1930s Fitzrovia to the sexual mayhem of the Villa Seurat in Paris, her story shines new light on an extraordinary group of people. In a remote village on pre-war Corfu Nancy and Lawrence found a paradise where they wrote and painted, quarrelled and loved. But in 1939 their idyll was blown apart by war. They fled to Cairo, where the marriage collapsed. They parted, and for the next five years Nancy struggled as a lone mother amid the horrors of wartime Palestine.
Amateurs in Eden is a riveting portrait of a remarkable woman, of a turbulent marriage, of love, loss and courage in a vanished world.
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