Customer Reviews

Our Hearts Were Young and Gay: An Unforgettable Comic Chronicle of Innocents Abroad in the 1920s

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"We were poisonously young." - Co-authors Skinner and Kimbrough

OUR HEARTS WERE YOUNG AND GAY is a travel essay that appeared in 1942. Within, co-authors and best pals Cornelia Otis Skinner from Bryn Mawr, PA and Emily Kimbrough from Indiana share the experiences of an independent trip to Europe made in 1920 when young, footloose and relatively free of parental oversight. Skinner's parents were traveling on a parallel but more or less separate itinerary.

The charm of this delightful narrative lies in the fact that it's a recollection of girlish innocence, naivete, and silliness told from the perspective of a more mature adulthood that achieves an engaging, self-deprecating wit. Had the two travelers been teenage boys, I doubt that such a retrospective tale would've been conceived and told by their grown-up counterparts; it's just not a Guy Thing.

From Montreal to London to Paris, our heroines' misadventures are myriad. Their passenger ship runs aground in the St. Lawrence Seaway. Cornelia contracts measles in the mid-Atlantic and must be virtually smuggled ashore on reaching England. The two get lost in the maze at Hampton Court. Misdirected to recommended lodgings in Rouen, they spend the night on the top floor of a brothel, to the bemusement of the house madam, and never have a clue. (Teenage boys would've noticed, you think?) At the Rouen railroad station, Emily's overstuffed purse looses its contents onto the tracks just as a train pulls in. Bedbugs attack Skinner in the City of Light. Lunch at the Paris Ritz proves mortifying. A treacherous hair net ("Venida double-mesh") manifests itself during Cornelia's introductory acting lesson with a French stage idol.

Of course, not all of the mini-Grand Tour was comprised of frivolous mishaps. It was, for Skinner and Kimbrough, the experience of a young lifetime. As the latter put it:

"You know, back in Indiana there's a lovely phrase of yearning. People say, 'I hope I get to go.' Well, I've gotten to go, and here I am ..."

Kimbrough's "here" was in front of Rouen Cathedral, after having walked down from the city's Market Place where the 19-year old Joan of Arc, a girl of Emily's and Cornelia's own exact age and their hero, was burned at the stake. I myself have thought "Here I am" when, my interest being English history, I've stood on the spot where Becket was murdered, when wandering the windy hilltop ruins of Salisbury Tower where Henry II imprisoned his Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and when gazing upon the field where Harold II lost a kingdom.

Oh, to be footloose and young again. I'd give anything.

I found this book in the tiny public library of my small Texas town in 1946 when I was ten years old. Years later I hunted down a used copy for my four daughters to read and still more years later I'm hunting copies for my 8 granddaughters.

One of those granddaughters has her 14th birthday in a couple of weeks, and I came to Amazon today expecting to have to buy a used copy, not realizing that it has been reissued.

(OOPS! I see now a few months later that it's once again out of print. A used or remainder copy shouldn't be hard to find.)

So few books of this genre are truly interesting or truly funny. Most of them consist of anecdotes that leave you thinking, "I guess you had to be there". Not this one. Those two girls were disaster-magnets. I think only David Niven's "The Moon is a Balloon" has made me laugh out loud as many times, and it's a much longer book.

The writing is seamless and authentically witty, the line drawings are almost Thurberesque in the way they stay in your mind's eye forever after.

This is a true American classic. Don't miss it.

Having first watched the black-and-white movie based on this book, I was eager to meet Cornelia and Emily again inside its pages, and was not disappointed. The story of two young girls taking their first trip abroad, Our Hearts Were Young and Gay is the true story of their adventures, ranging from heartwarming to hilarious. Some memorable incidents: Emily throwing a deckchair over the side of the ship to "save" a man who fell overboard and inadvertantly hitting him with it instead; the safety pockets which both girls' mothers insisted they wear beneath their clothes (to keep money and stuff in) and which mystifies their dance partners by swinging beneath their skirts and hitting them; Cornelia's bout with measles, and how she and Emily get off the ship without being quarantined; spending the night in a brothel which they have mistaken for a genteel ladies' hotel . . . and many, many more. Be prepared to laugh and laugh as you read this great book.

(I am b.rothermel's daughter). My aunt gave me one of her multiple copies of Our Hearts Were Young and Gay for my fifteenth birthday, and I LOVE it! Emily and Cornelia are perfect mirrors of my best friend and me, who are both dying to travel abroad together. What makes this book so great is that it all really happened, which encourages my friend and me even more. If they did it, we can, right? (Of course, the whole trip cost them a little over eighty dollars...) This book is one of those I'll read again and again, because it puts me in a lighthearted state of mind like an Elizabeth Enright or Eleanor Estes book does; it has that old-fashioned charm. P.S.--Thanks, Karen Bramblet--I was so happy to learn there's a movie! I'll be sure to watch it!

This delightful book brings back memories of my own traveling abroad (thing seem to happen to me too) as well as time spend with my very own Emily. How refreshing to discover Europe through the wide and innocent eyes of two 19 years olds! The travel purses, rabbit-fur coats, and encounter with Mr. Wells are just a few of the delightful incidents you will find as you laugh your way through this book. This is one of those books that gets better with age--I can't wait to rediscover it again in a few years!

Very fun and lighthearted memoir of two American girls' summer in Europe. The trip took place in 1920, when the two girls were around 20 years old. While there are some attitudes and circumstances that are definitely dated, there are many more that definitely ring true. My first trip abroad was undertaken at about the same age as these young adventurers, and I'm quite sure I tried, as did they, to seem oh-so-sophisticated and continental when most of the time I was just a coarse American blundering about. The author does a wonderful job of conveying the feeling of being young and alive and in an exotic place with all of your life before you. Many passages made me laugh out loud, and some of the things that happened to these girls can hardly be believed, but supposedly it is all true . . . I would highly recommend for any woman who travelled to Europe as a young person.

I read this book many years ago when I was a teenager. I came across it as I was cleaning out a bookcase I was moving to a different room and reread it; it's still funny! Cornelia Otis Skinner is an excellent writer with good phrasing and descriptions of the people they meet on their voyage and during their stay in England and France. And it gives the reader of today an idea of what life was like in 1920 for two upper-class 19-year-old girls. I dumped the shredding paperback I had and bought this hardcover edition to give to my adult daughter. I know she'll enjoy it.

After knowing about the title for many years, I finally found a copy of "Our Hearts Were Young and Gay" in a New Orleans bookshop, with a cover which I think was trying to tie in with Marilyn Monroe's "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (well, it was about two girls in Paris as well!). One reading, and I was hooked. For over twenty years I have read the book every April (why April? The semester is grinding down and me with it) and every year it still fills me delight, even though I have detected a few inconsistencies, probably the result of Ms. Skinner's delightful sense of exaggeration. However, I have no doubt that the major incidents are all real and authentic, because those are the kinds of things that happen on extended travel. My favorite part: I guess it's the brief but illuminating passage when both girls (in their late teens, traveling by themselves, and educated at Bryn Mawr!) learn the truth about the birds and the bees at the Cluny Museum in Paris.

I first read this book in 1969. I took it into my bedroom and as I read it I laughed so hard that I cried. I've read it a couple of times since then and have loaned out the copy to so many people that I had to purchase another. Prepare to be charmed by these two girls, and their mad escapades. It was written in a time that is long since gone and is the greatest kind of escape. I'm always sad when this journey come to an end.

I get as much joy from reading this book as an adult as I did as a teenager! It's just plain fun!