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

I read this memoir having heard the author interviewed on 'Woman's Hour' and it is one of the most interesting and moving books I have read for a long time. Nancy Myers, the author's mother, was married to Lawrence Durrell, the writer who was read by everyone in the 1950s and 60s but who has recently fallen out of fashion. You don't have to be familiar with his work to enjoy this book - it is a book about a marriage and a relationship - between a brilliant, needy, controlling man and a dreamy, beautiful art student who managed to escape a miserable childhood to shine in the pre-war London centred around the Slade. Early in their marriage they left London for an idyllic life in Corfu, familiar to anyone who has loved Lawrence's younger brother Gerald's 'My Family and Other Animals'. As Lawrence achieved success as a writer, so his domination of Nancy grew but her efforts to establish herself other than as a silent muse were crushed by her husband. They escaped Corfu in a dramatic escape when the Germans arrived and landed in Cairo, where they finally parted and Nancy spent the war as single mother in wartime Palestine before meeting and marrying her second husband (the author's father). She was supposed to marry someone else but letters were not delivered and she fell for his gesture of decorating a lampost with his Old Etonian tie....
That is the arc of the story but it doesn't properly convey the charm of the writing, the entertaining way it is told or the evocation of life in 1930s London and Corfu. It is a wise, warm-hearted book and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading about real lives written with perception and style

A daughter writes about her own mother with love and understanding instead of taking revenge, and with candour that does not lead to betrayal. The subject of the book - Lawrence Durrell's first wife - is fascinating even to a reader who is quite uninterested in Lawrence Durrell himself, or any of his writing.In effect, this is a most unusual biography.I recommend it highly.

This is a delightful read - the remarkable story of Nancy Myers (1912-1983), the first wife of Lawrence Durrell, as told by her daughter Joanna (the daughter of Nancy and her second husband Edward Hodgkin). Being an ardent genealogist, I love learning about other people's lives and this, combined with the fact that Nancy was born in the same year as my own mother, made Amateurs in Eden irresistible.

The book begins with a wonderfully detailed account of Nancy's childhood. Her mother - as Nancy was constantly reminded - was `the best woman in the world'. At boarding school she was afflicted with `a nervous stomach' - her soiled petticoat being displayed to all as evidence of her `truly awful wickedness'.

But most of the book focuses on Nancy's tumultuous life with Lawrence both before and after he found fame. They were a physically mismatched couple (Nancy a beautiful leggy blond; Durrell a stocky 5'4"). When they met in a pub, Lawrence was an estate agent and Nancy was studying at the Slade. They married in 1935 and moved to Corfu where, at first, despite many fierce arguments, they lived an outwardly idyllic bohemian life.

They also spent time in Paris, where they mixed with the likes of Henry Miller and his lover Anais Nin. This is where their relationship began to fail; the book reveals how Lawrence kept his wife very much in the background (she wasn't even allowed to talk to men taller than her husband and Anais commented on Nancy's `eloquent silences'.)

Shortly before the outbreak of war they moved to Athens and Durrell began working in the information section of the British Embassy. Their daughter, Penelope, was born here in 1940. But in 1941 the family was forced to flee to Cairo and later, with the approach of Rommel, on to Palestine. This was where their marriage finally collapsed. Nancy had become close to a newly married couple and, after seeing their happiness and the fact that they enjoyed each other's company so much, she realised that her own marriage was a sham. A devastated Durrell returned to Cairo, but Nancy and Penelope lived out the rest of the war in Palestine and it was here that Nancy met her second husband.

As the book makes clear, Nancy was a talented artist. It is also clear that in her youth she was lively and high spirited. One of the many interesting aspects of this biography is to see how marriage to Durrell seems to have repressed so much of her joie de vivre.

It was her fate to be airbrushed out of the life of her famous husband. In an attempt to set the records straight, Nancy began writing her own memoirs - but by the time she had reached 1932 she was dying of cancer. The remainder of her memoirs were taped by her second husband, the author's father. By the time Joanna began to write this book, Nancy had been dead for 25 years - but she and her mother had talked incessantly, and this book confirms that she had a wealth of material to draw on. In contrast, Joanna's half-sister Penelope complained that their mother had never discussed anything with her. It was as if they had been brought up by different women.

Joanna has served her mother well with this very entertaining and extremely honest book. She has brought out the personality of someone who was forced to become a shadowy, shy presence in the lives of people who made a great deal more noise than she did. I highly recommend this book.