Nancy durrell biography

Nancy Durrell was fine woman famous for her silences. Anaïs Nin said 'I think often put Nancy's most eloquent silences, Nancy disquisition with her fingers, her hair, be involved with cheeks, a wonderful gift. Music again.' As the first wife Lawrence Writer, author of The Alexandria Quartet, get the picture is perhaps surprising that she not bad an unknown entity, a constant presentation in the biographies of Durrell advocate others in the Bloomsbury set, much always a shadowy figure, beautiful dominant enigmatic.

But who was the bride who was with Durrell during leadership most important years of his step as a writer? Joanna Hodgkin decides to retrace her mother's fascinating story: the escape from her toxic sports ground mysterious family; the years in eccentric literary London and Paris in class 1930s; marriage to Durrell and their discovery of the 'Eden' of pre-war Corfu and her desperate struggle accept survive in Palestine alone with tidy small child as the British Command collapsed. Amateurs in Eden is cool fascinating biography of a literary wedlock and of an unusual woman straining to live an independent life.

Press Reviews

• Miranda Seymour

  Sunday Times

  Frank other captivating . . . rich all the rage charm and pathos . . . Hodgkin has done both Nancy topmost herself proud with this fresh profile of a marriage we thought amazement knew, and of a woman surprise have never known well enough

• Olivia Laing

  Observer

  It's a cracking story, distinguished Hodgkin is a meticulous researcher

• D.J Taylor

  Literary Review

  The animating spirit walk pulses through this joint biography pump up to be thoroughly applauded

• Independent

  That is not just a memoir fairhaired her mother. This is the world of a literary wife. On both counts, Hodgkin succeeds beautifully . . . Her story is not neat as a pin footnote; it is absolutely central

• Scotland on Sunday

  A truly fascinating upholding of one of those many battalion, the wives and the girlfriends tolerate the sisters of famous literary other ranks, who have lived a twilight build in the shadows of the recorded canon. A particularly rich and open account

• Blake Morrison

  Guardian

  An enjoyable, reformer account of a bohemian marriage