Bøker av Anne Hall

Four popular novelists of the same generation each wrote a novel inspired by a holiday that the author spent in France. In the nineteen-fift ies, Rumer Godden basedThe Greengage Summeron her recollections of her family's 1923 battlefield- tour manqué in the Champagne region. Margery Sharp's 1936 holiday in Southern France led toStill WatersandThe Nutmeg Tree: both the short story and the novel are set in and around the region of Aix-les-Bains. In 1955, Daphne du Maurier first visited the department of Sarthe to research French family history; the novelThe Scapegoatwas the immediate result of the holiday. And in 1966, Stella Gibbons' last trip to the continent took the form of a visit to an old friend in her summer home near Grenoble. The stay is obliquely refl ected in The Snow-Woman, in which a similar holiday leads a never-married septuagenarian to experience a renaissance of sorts.

Born in London in 1890, Angela Thirkell was Sir Edward Burne-JonesΓÇÖs granddaughter, J.M. BarrieΓÇÖs goddaughter and a cousin of Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin. John Collier painted her portrait and she was drawn by John Singer Sargent and Thea Proctor. Between 1931 and her death in 1961, Angela published more than thirty books in a variety of genres. She began with the acclaimed family memoir Three Houses and later settled on her amusing Barsetshire series, inspired by Anthony Trollope but set in the present day.Angela Thirkell: A WriterΓÇÖs Life tells the authorΓÇÖs story from her Kensington childhood to her two marriages and the birth of three sons, Graham McInnes, Colin MacInnes and Lance Thirkell, all of whom also entered the literary world. The book traces her decade in Australia where she wrote for magazines and newspapers and made radio broadcasts, followed by her return to London and her fortuitous meeting with a young publisher called Jamie Hamilton, which lead to her bestselling Barsetshire novels.

Widnes local history