The Sunlight on the Garden: A Family in Love, War and Madness [Paperback]

Lizzie Speller's memoir of her ancestry and own life is a sparkling and varied tapestry. She describes her larger-than-life ancestors with vivacity and humour, but also illuminates the poignancy of some of their lives with great tenderness. The author's descendancy from aristocracy on the distaff side of her family is handled with a light touch, almost an aside. She invites the reader into the lives of her relatives and allows us an insight into some of the deep suffering they bore through depressive illness, a condition prevalent in several generations of the women in her family. She does not shy from writing about discord and divorces, mistresses and lovers all of which prevail amongst her relatives, and the effects on them of two world wars, but brings a respectful humour to the darker sides of their lives. She tells ruefully how old-fashioned prejudices affected the lives of her grandparents' generation and dips backwards and forward through the decades illustrating how little personal relationships changed. Do not expect a neat chronological account from this book; it is the time travel that enhances the charm and vitality of this memoir.

Elizabeth Speller, author of a new WW1 novel, "The Return of Captain John Emmett", is also known for her non-fiction. In a book published in 2008, Speller writes about her family. Specifically, her mother's family and the last four generations. What has distinguished this family in the last 120 years or so are both the murkiness of connections in society and the mental problems of many of the family members. Speller's great-grandmother - from a poor family - became first the mistress and then the wife of a member of the Howard/Cavendish family. She gave birth to three children before the marriage - who were not acknowledged as family members - and then five or six after the marriage. Speller's grandmother was one of the younger - and luckier - children. Born in 1899, Joan Howard, educated in Switzerland prior to WW1, married the son of a wealthy department store owner, in 1922, and had three children. One of the three was Elizabeth Speller's mother.

Joan's marriage and family life was marred by severe mental problems. She was burned in an accident and spent time recovering. She was always conscience of her scars. During WW2, Joan and Eric sent Elizabeth's mother and aunt to live in South Africa. The parents separated and divorced and Joan became did war-duty with the Polish army-in-exile stationed in England. She fell in love with a Polish soldier who went back to Poland at war's end. Joan spent much of her life searching for...happiness, I suppose. She was put in a sanitarium and subjected to ECT, and, eventually, a partial lobotomy. Elizabeth, her granddaughter, born in 1951 as the oldest of three children, lived an eccentric life in 50's and 60's England. Schooled and unschooled, Elizabeth made choices that seemed not to bring her a great deal of stability. In the early 1980's, after the birth of two children, she fell apart and was committed to a sanitarium, suffering from crushing depression. Part of the book tells the often harrowing story of her eventual recovery and return to society.

Speller's book is not quite a memoir but rather a record of the depression and other mental problems that her family members have suffered. It's also a story of the times - from about 1900 on. She's an excellent writer and she tells her story in a masterful way. The family members come alive in nuanced writing. She includes a family tree in the front of the book to help confused readers.

Memoir - particularly the memoir of family and madness - seems to be the new mini-genre to replace the increasingly dreary "survivor lit" genre, and, if this book is anything to go by, we should welcome it. It's a moving, revelatory book about a fascinating family - the author's own - in fascinating times. It moves from the Edwardian sunlight through the darkness of two world wars, to emerge, with a sort of wonderful redemption, at the present day.

The author is a poet and historian, and you can see both at work here: a wonderful eye for the telling detail, and a use of language which is uncannily supple and sensuous. But her own story, which lies at the book's heart, speaks to any of us who have known more than ordinary sadness. She writes both movingly and, amazingly, wittily about her descent into psychotic depression; lays to rest innumerable ignorant ghosts about madness; and surfaces triumphantly to start a new life, of which this book is just one of the fruits.

Nowhere does Speller seem to be telling the story either to big herself up ("Whose sufferings are greater than mine?") or to elicit our sympathy. What she's doing seems to be looking for the truth among the lies all families tell each other -- weaving her own story in with that of her family and that, in turn, with the times in which they lived. The result is not only the unravelling of a fascinating emotional puzzle, but a view of the last century of history from the standpoint of a single family.

A pretty crackpot family, it must be said, lousy at intimacy and the expression of love, promiscuous, minatory, snobbish, self-inventing, shot through with occasional acts of heroism or great emotional generosity. Dukes, sausage-makers, beauties, cheats, shopkeepers, lunatics, self-deluding plutocrats, would-be artists, real artists, drunken real artists, seductions, fires, wounds, lovesick suicidal Poles... the list goes on.

But the really remarkable thing, as I said, is the brave and unflinching eye Speller brings to her own sectioning in what we have to call a lunatic asylum because it doesn't deserve to be called a hospital. Though there was precious little asylum there. Everyone, in the end, is in some way or other redeemed by her kindly eye. Except for the male charge nurse in the, yes, asylum, who repeatedly raped (the only word for it) the author in return for drugs. That she escaped undamaged is lucky; that she came out of it without terrible anger is remarkable. A complex, intricate, textured book, impossible to classify; but it reads with lucidity and charm and in the end is powerfully moving. If the Next New Thing is "MadLit", then The Sunlight On the Garden should be at the head of the list.