Enchanted Evening: Volume III of the Autobiography of M. M. Kaye [Hardcover]

M. M. Kaye (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 5, 2000 | Series: Autobiography of M. M. Kaye

In the first volume of her autobiography, The Sun in the Morning, M.M. Kaye detailed the first eighteen years of her life in India and England and introduced readers to her love affair with India. She brought to life its people, scents, vibrant colors, and breathtaking landscapes. In the second volume, Golden Afternoon, she happily returned to her beloved India after years in a British boarding school. New to the glories of the Delhi social season, M.M. Kaye recounted her delightful exploits as a vivacious young woman in Raj society.

Now, in Enchanted Evening, M.M. Kaye is a young woman forced to leave her cherished home in India when her father takes a new post in china. Though at first disoriented by the unfamiliar customs and confusing protocol of her new surroundings, it is in China that she discovers the pleasures that come from independence. Coming into her own as a painter, Kaye first meets with artistic success in China and then moves to cramped quarters in London's South Kensington neighborhood, where she begins to flourish as a writer.

With vivid descriptions and the wisdom that comes with age, M.M. Kaye looks back on the years she spent as a young woman in a world as yet unmarked by World War II's devastation.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The third volume of M.M. Kaye's memoirs continues the story of her life in the engagingly chatty style that is familiar from The Sun in the Morning and Golden Afternoon. As this volume begins, Kaye is a young woman in her 20s, apprehensively en route to China in the spring of 1932. She would have preferred to remain in India, her childhood home (and the setting, many years later, for her bestselling novel The Far Pavilions), but her beloved father, who has been dismissed unfairly from the British colonial service, wants to retire in China. Kaye's account of the family's sojourn is colorful and often quite funny, but the mood darkens when they return to India for younger sister Bet's wedding and their father dies shortly thereafter. Kaye goes to England, planning to support herself as an illustrator, but stumbles instead into a career writing mysteries and children's books. The self-effacing author presents this turn of events as a simple stroke of luck, and devotes most of her text to amusing anecdotes and evocative descriptions of landscape, particularly after royalty payments enable her to return happily to India. In the privileged British Raj, politics hardly impinge until World War II begins in 1939, and this ill wind blows good toward our redoubtable heroine, who meets Mr. Right in the shape of an Indian Army officer who is escaping a bad marriage. Even here, Kaye is oh-so-English in her assertion that Lieutenant Godfrey John Hamilton was "only too ready to fall into the arms of almost any unattached woman.... I can only be profoundly and eternally grateful that she happened to be me." The warm humanism and ready wit that are displayed throughout these charming reminiscences will prompt most readers to feel that Lieutenant Hamilton was the lucky one. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly

Fans of this British author's bestselling fiction (The Far Pavilions) will greatly enjoy the third volume (following The Sun in the Morning and Golden Afternoon) of her autobiography, Share of Summer. This memoir extends from the end of WWI through WWII, when, in the midst of the complex international situation, a number of momentous events occurred in Kaye's life. In her early 20s, she and her family left India, the country where she spent a happy and protected childhood as the daughter of a career British army officer. Her beloved father, Tacklow, brought the family back to China, but his wife and two daughters did not share his enthusiasm for the country in which he had first established himself; after several years, the family returned by way of Japan to India. Back in India, TacklowDKaye's bedrockDdied suddenly of a heart attack, a loss that transformed her life. She returned to London, where she worked as a painter during the day and, to cope with her lonely evenings, joined a "Tuppenny Library" and started to write. The success of her first novel (Six Bars and Seven) and a children's book series (Potter Pinner Meadow) enabled Kaye not only to return to India during the war, but made it possible for her to do a good bit of traveling, including a visit to Persia (now Iran), faithfully detailed here. Kaye writes with a vivid and personal immediacyDwhether describing exotic locales or the most ordinary day. At the same time, as one who lived a privileged life and celebrates the glories of British imperialism, her world and point of view often seem remote, decadent and even unjust. But fans of her fiction and readers who enjoy tales about the halcyon days of the British Empire will be charmed. B&w photos. Agent, Phyllis Westberg, Harold Ober Asoociates. (Dec. 18)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (December 5, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312265816
• ISBN-13: 978-0312265816
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,279,303 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The third and hopefully not last volume of the series!, August 15, 2002

By 

A. Woodley "Patroness, Janeites, the Austen list" (New Zealand) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Enchanted Evening: Volume III of the Autobiography of M. M. Kaye (Hardcover)

...or perhaps this should be subtitled - in which Mollie searches for Mr Right. This is the third volume of MM Kayes hugely enjoyable and readable autobiographies - and they are of her childhood - and in the case of this, the third volume, her young adulthood in India. Yet this book ends in 1939 with the world on the brink of war and India still almost a decade away from independence.

Mollie's world is still that of the Raj, the privilege and the society of exiled Englishmen and women who have literally transposed their lives to another country but hugely interesting to read - and funny. MM Kaye is an excellent observationalist and writer - India in all its colours and textures comes alive under her pen.

Also her search - or rather perhaps her family's search for a Mr Right to take her off the shelf and (according to her sister-in-law) off their hands.

I very much hope this is not the final volume of her book because MM Kaye (last I heard) was still alive and so ending her autobiographies in 1939 when there is such a huge amount of her life left to cover would be a travesty. She didn't even publish her first epic novel until the late 1950's although her mysteries were being written at this early stage.

MM Kaye is such a good writer this may be the perfect way to meet her - through her autobiographies.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enchanting is the Right Word!, March 20, 2001

By 

Joanna (Hillsboro Beach, FL USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Enchanted Evening: Volume III of the Autobiography of M. M. Kaye (Hardcover)

Am enjoying this third part of M.M.Kaye's autobiography as much as the previous two--maybe more! Her description of the death of her father so mirrors my own, I was reminded of my sister's statement that "nothing ever turns out the way one thinks it will." Ms. Kaye has such a way with description and words, and it is fascinating to read of these last days in countries like China, Japan and India that were irrevocably changed by WWII. I hope there will be a Part IV!! I am filled with a longing for these seemingly gentler times, even though I was born long after they were already a memory to Ms. Kaye.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Light, fun to read, and fascinating., January 11, 2001

By 

Carole Williams (Mill Valley, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Enchanted Evening: Volume III of the Autobiography of M. M. Kaye (Hardcover)

I just finished Enchanted Evening, and I liked it as much as I've liked all of M. M. Kaye's work. Although not well off financially, she and her family lived in India and China during what seemed like a fun period for women of the English upper classes -- not much to do besides attend parties, travel to exotic locales, and search for a suitable husband. Her stories of the good times she had, plus how she began to support herself with her art and with writing, were a very welcome distraction to me. I am looking forward to reading the next one.