Amateurs In Eden: The Story of a Bohemian Marriage: Nancy and Lawrence Durrell

Description

Nancy Durrell was a woman famous for her silences. Anaïs Nin said ”I think often of Nancy”s most eloquent silences, Nancy talking with her fingers, her hair, her cheeks, a wonderful gift. Music again.” As the first wife Lawrence Durrell, author of The Alexandria Quartet, it is perhaps surprising that she is an unknown entity, a constant presence in the biographies of Durrell and others in the Bloomsbury set, yet always a shadowy figure, beautiful and enigmatic.

But who was the woman who was with Durrell during the most important years of his development as a writer? Joanna Hodgkin decides to retrace her mother”s fascinating story: the escape from her toxic and mysterious family; the years in bohemian literary London and Paris in the 1930s; marriage to Durrell and their discovery of the ”Eden” of pre-war Corfu and her desperate struggle to survive in Palestine alone with a small child as the British Mandate collapsed. Amateurs in Eden is a fascinating biography of a literary marriage and of an unusual woman struggling to live an independent life.