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

The story of Lawrence Durrell and his enigmatic first wife, Nancy: love, betrayal and literary endeavour set among the glittering intellectuals of 1930s London, Paris and Corfu

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.

• | Author: Joanna Hodgkin
• | Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
• | Publication Date: Feb 01, 2013
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• | Binding: Paperback / softback
• | ISBN-13: 9781844087945
• | ISBN-10: 1844087948