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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lucy M Boston -- Knowing the Author Makes a Big Difference,
By John Gough "John Gough - Deakin University" (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Perverse and foolish: A memoir of childhood and youth (Hardcover)
Perverse and Foolish, Oft I Strayed, may be the lines of the traditional hymn. But in the case of Lucy Boston, the perverseness is more a matter of fascinating English eccentricity, and the foolishness is really a kind of modesty than a confession of anything more dangerous than naivety and childlikeness.Lucy Boston is perhaps best known for her classic children's novel "The Children of Green Knowe" (1954), a seminal time-slip, ghost story, set in a real house, the house Boston herself fell in love with an adult, the house that features in her other autobiographical memoir, "Memory in a House" (1973). An excellent discussion of "The Children of Green Knowe" is given in Aidan Chambers' prize-winning essay "The Reader in the Book", published in "Signal" number 23 May 1977, and reprinted in Chambers' own book of essays "Booktalk: Occasional Writing on Literature and Children" (Bodley Head, 1985). Chambers explores the subtle of Boston's telling, and the "gaps" in her story, where the reader is required to work hard, completing what Boston has not said -- is the old grandmother in the book making up stories for her grand-child? is the grand-child's experience with the ghosts a dream, suggested by the grandmother's stories of her ancestors? or is it a child's imagined play? Moreover, what is the resolution of the plight of the illegitimates in the story, the grandchild, and the old gardener -- both of them have suffered a Cinderella-like disruption in their families. The house, "Green Knowe", and the ancient piece of topiary, a gnarled yew tree callaed Green Noah (linked with the name of the house, and the family that live there) are vivid parts of this story. And no woder, as they are vidid features of Boston's own life. The fact that her son, Peter, illustrates her books, drawing from life, adds a piquant twist to the truth behind the fiction, the underlying reality of generations of history stored in a place, a piece of landscape and a building inhabited across centuries. The house, or a version of it, along with Boston herself, or a version of her, also feature in her adult novel "Yew Hall", a disturbing story of rose gardening, an ancient, possibly malvolent house, adultery, murder and suicide -- hardly a children's book. But the young lovers in the story make the book interesting to Young Adult readers, and others who have read Boston's other stories of her house. She is a fascinating person, growing up in an odd, decidely English family. Again and again in her books we encounter aspects of the author, and her house, and her sense of place in a landscape and a history. Her neglected novel "Persephone" is a Young Adult story which deserves high praise, and should stand alongside the teenage novels of Rumer Godden and Elizaberth Goudge, the books about the angst of adolescence, the joy and terror of early sexuality, the love and agony that comes with Christian faith, and loss of faith. The young girl in the story flees the sexual advances of her step-father, seeks solace in a convcent, and then suffers madness and desperation as she falls in love with an aristocratic half-crazed artist. Powerful stuff. Whre do authors get their ideas? In Boston's case, from aspects of her own life. "Perverse and Foolish" speaks of Boston's childhood, odd and eccentric like many others at the start of the Twentieth century, an era of ageing Victorian conservatism challenged by the new technologies and values of radical thinking and modern science. Later, poised on the brink of becoming a social butterfly, as ger family would wish he to become, Boston flees this, using the horrors of World War I as a way of legitimising her escape. She becomes a Volunteer Nurse in France, seeing the aftermath of the Western Front in the shattered lives of those she nurses, with virtually no formal nurses' training, only the good intentions of being a "volunteer". There she meets men in ways she could not possibly manage, had she stayed at home. There, too, she meets, and marries the man who fathered her only child -- a marriage that was be be dissolved, that could only lead to her long life in the mysterious Green Knowe -- a marriage over which she quickly draws a tactful(?), "shocked(?) veil, refusing to explain what went wrong. Here is the basis for the books. Well worth finding out. Some day, we may hope, othjer parts of her life, the remaining undisclosed secrets, may be told, perhaps by her son, or by a sympathetic biographer. As with other children's writers, such as Rosemary Sutcliff, the author is as interesting as the author's fiction, and knowledge of the personal life informs the imagined lives the author has created, subtly altering the simple-seeming experience of so-called "children's books".
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