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Four French Holidays - Daphne Du Maurier Stella Gibbons Rumer Godden Margery Sharp and their novels inspired by France - cover

Four French Holidays - Daphne Du Maurier Stella Gibbons Rumer Godden Margery Sharp and their novels inspired by France

Anne Hall

Publisher: Unicorn

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Summary

Four popular novelists of the same generation each wrote a novel inspired by a holiday that the author spent in France. In the nineteen-fifties, Rumer Godden based The Greengage Summer on her recollections of her family's 1923 battlefield-tour manqué in the Champagne region. Margery Sharp's 1936 holiday in Southern France led to 'Still Waters' and The 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 novel The Scapegoat was 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 reflected in The Snow-Woman, in which a similar holiday leads a never-married septuagenarian to experience a renaissance of sorts.
Available since: 03/01/2023.
Print length: 144 pages.

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