Memories

review by Celia Eddy
reviewed 17/03/2001

Lucy Boston produced two books of autobiography, Memory in a House (1973) and Perverse and Foolish (1979) After her death in 1990, the two books were published as this one single volume. In it, Lucy described a typical Victorian childhood in the family home in Southport, the far-reaching effects on the family of the early death of her father and her mother’s subsequent efforts to raise Lucy, her sister and two brothers. Lucy, it is clear, was from the outset a person of high intelligence and of strong and independent spirit, as the events of her life and her subsequent achievements proved. She gained a place at Oxford but in her first year, the beginning of the First World War, abandoned it to become a VAD in France. She writes movingly of her experiences at that time, then of her subsequent marriage and her progress towards her self-realisation as artist, writer and gardener, which to a large extent was achieved through acquiring the Norman manor house which became the centre of her life and the inspiration for her books. This is a book which works on many levels: it’s the personal history of a woman whom we would recognise as a feminist, even though it wouldn’t have occurred to her to describe herself like that, as well as a fascinating account of the Herculean task she undertook in restoring The Manor and its garden.

© Celia Eddy