Austerity Baby

Austerity baby might best be described as an 'oblique memoir'. Janet Wolff's fascinating volume is a family history - but one that is wide-ranging and consistently surprising. The underlying and repeated themes of the book are exile and displacement, life (and death) during the Third Reich, mother-daughter and sibling relationships, the generational transmission of trauma and experience, transatlantic reflections and the struggle for creative expression.

Stories mobilised and people encountered in the course of the narrative include: the internment of aliens in Britain during the Second World War; cultural life in Rochester, New York in the 1920s; the social and personal meanings of colour(s); the industrialist and philanthropist Henry Simon of Manchester and his relationship with the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen; the liberal British campaigner and MP of the 1940s Eleanor Rathbone; and reflections on the lives and images of spinsters. The text is supplemented throughout by extensive visual materials - including photographs, paintings and facsimile documents - which illustrate the story while engaging indirectly with the written word.