The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm [Paperback]

Juliet Nicolson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 13, 2008

The Perfect Summer chronicles a glorious English summer a century ago, when the world was on the cusp of irrevocable change. Through the tight lens of four months, Juliet Nicolson’s rich storytelling gifts rivet us with the sights, colors, and feelings of a bygone era. That summer of 1911 a new king was crowned and the aristocracy was at play, bounding from one house party to the next. But perfection was not for all. Cracks in the social fabric were showing. The country was brought to a standstill by industrial strikes. Temperatures rose steadily to more than 100 degrees; by August deaths from heatstroke were too many for newspapers to report. Drawing on material from intimate and rarely seen sources and narrated through the eyes of a series of exceptional individuals--among them a debutante, a choirboy, a politician, a trade unionist, a butler, and the queen--The Perfect Summer is a vividly rendered glimpse of the twilight of the Edwardian era.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The granddaughter of Bloomsbury notables Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson chronicles the minutiae of the hot, sunny summer of 1911, when the rich crammed in a succession of parties as industrial strikes almost brought the country to a standstill, and WWI loomed on the horizon. Under Nicolson's lavish attentions, "upstairs" and "downstairs," the weighty and frivolous spring to vivid life. While Mary approached her upcoming coronation as queen with dread, Leonard Woolf fell in love with his Cambridge pal's sister, the budding novelist Virginia Stephen. The bewitching marchioness of Ripon arranged for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes to perform at Covent Garden, and the Times revealed that certain servants were selling juicy tidbits about their aristocratic employers to American newspapers. Trade unionist Mary Macarthur's fight for women's rights meshes artfully with racy novelist Elinor Glyn's adulterous affair with ambivalent lover Lord Curzon. Lady Diana Manners's tart observations of her debutante season segue to a rendezvous between a footman and a kitchen maid. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources—from Churchill's memoirs to the tell-all What the Butler Winked At—journalist Nicolson's debut, a British bestseller, serves up a delightfully gossipy yet substantial slice of social history. Photos not seen by PW. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* The storm of the subtitle is the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, and Nicolson focuses on a particular period of quiet before that storm: the English summer of 1911, which boasted extreme heat but also day after day of sunny weather. European life was on the precipice; the forthcoming horrible years of war would bring a sudden modernism to how people lived, from king to commoner. But in that summer of 1911, "England was plump with promise," and the author seeks to "evoke the full vivid richness of how it smelt, looked, sounded, tasted and felt to be alive" in the months from May to September. She reconstructs the lives of several English individuals whose particular life-tales add to the complete picture of those ironically self-contented months. Nicholson visits, among others, Queen Mary, wife of the new king, George V ("The people in the waiting crowd were gratified to see how splendid the new Queen looked in her beautiful frock and diamonds"); politician Winston Churchill ("Life without champagne was inconceivable for Winston"); socialite Lady Dianna Manners ("the golden girl of the summer"); and butler Eric Horne ("Not quite the faithful servant he was assumed to be by the deluded individuals who employed him, Eric's was an increasingly cynical view of the changing world"). As entertaining as it is edifying. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 290 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (May 13, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802143679
• ISBN-13: 978-0802143679
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 0.9 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #148,098 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

127 of 132 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars missing the point May 15, 2007

By Graham Barnes

Format:Hardcover

The British edition came out last year. Washington Post reviewer Yardley actually paints a very good picture. Nicolson is giving us interesting social history, set within a looming historical context of overwhelming magnitude, well written and engaging. There is little new in her book, but it is not material that has been presented this way in a generation or so, so Nicolson is making a real contribution by reviving not only the narrative of the period, but writing it for the present generation of readers. If Yardley's review suggests that this is the sort of thing you will like, then you will like this sort of thing.

Yardley seems to have spectacularly missed the point of the title, though, and spoils his review by repeatedly finding material in the text to slag the use of the word perfect. Even after nearly a century, no British reviewer would have so utterly failed to understand the reference and its meaning. Knowing that context would have helped Yardley to get the point, and would help any American reader appreciate the book for its qualities and flaws alike.

World War I struck Britain hard at every level of society and deep into the psyche of generations of Britons. Britain's more obvious national heroism and apparent unity in WW2, and its having not been occupied, makes that latter war seem more positive and less shattering an event than WW1, even though it truly finished off Britain's empire and gutted its prosperity more completely. As a result, WW1 looms more vividly in the British mind and culture than it does in nations damaged much worse by it. France and Germany have had worse since. 1914-18 remains the great dividing line of modern British history. Perhaps the serenely ahistorical young Britons of today no longer remember.... Anyone born before about 1980 is still touched by the presence of the Great War in the national narrative.

From very shortly after 1918, nostalgia for the Edwardian era, including the first few years of George V, was very powerful. It was the age before the cataclysm. Working men would say that even the beer tasted better, only half joking. Anyone grown to adulthood before 1914 remained a member of a generation apart from the life experience of the younger. Cultural and popular life was thought forever changed. All that had come before 1914 was remembered in a rosy glow.

All knew that this national myth was true in many ways, and all knew that it was also false in others. For those who didn't know, works such as "The Strange Death of Liberal England" (1931) recounted all of the social conflicts great and small that had troubled the age before the war, and indeed connected them to the causes of the war.

And yet on some level it was still true, and Britain has never let go of it because of that. The appreciation of both its truth and its irony is palpable in Nicolson's retelling, as it has been so many times before.

The summer of 1914 has often been given the pride of place in this narrative. It too was a sunny summer of both peace and social strife, the very last halcyon days. But it was also too close to the cliff edge.

The summer of 1911 was the last summer of the strict Edwardian Age, the time Edward still lived and the darkness was farther below the horizon. If 1914 is given second place, then 1911 is raised to first.

And so for all its known ironies, that is why 1911 was "The Perfect Summer". Nicolson knows both sides of it, and presents them well. Good for her. Read more ›

52 of 52 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining Social History May 21, 2007

By John D. Cofield TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Juliet Nicolson is following in the footsteps of her father Nigel and her grandparents Harold and Vita (Sackville-West) Nicolson by producing history which reads like fine literature. The Perfect Summer is the story of the summer months of 1911, a year which in retrospect for England was indeed the calm before the storm of World War I.

Because 1911 was a Coronation Year much of The Perfect Summer focusses on the lives and doings of England's upper classes, from King George V and Queen Mary through Society luminaries like the Marchioness of Ripon and politicians like Winston Churchill. There is more to The Perfect Summer than gossip about the elite, however. The summer months of 1911 were filled with tension as the Liberal Government struggled to reform the House of Lords, the British and Germans clashed in Morocco, and strikes spread across the country. In addition, most of the summer was brutally hot and dry. All of this is well and thoroughly discussed with plenty of references from newspapers and magazines of the period to add immediacy.

The Perfect Summer will join Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower as an essential resource to help us better understand the world which came to an end forever just three summers later.

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A well-written book... June 2, 2007

By Jill Meyer TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

about a very interesting summer. The Summer of 1914 has been explored in many books, most notably by Barbara Tuchman, but here, Ms Nicolson writes about a very important season a few years earlier. The weather was hot, the new King and Queen were being coronated, and society was in a gentle upheaval. Edward VII's death the previous year truly ended the Victorian age and all sorts of "new things" were being done by members of all levels of society.

Nicolson writes easily about the time and the people. One incident she writes about made me chuckle. On page 167 she mentions Hwfa Williams being shot and wounded "in the Mall by 'an overworked telegraph clerk whose brain had given way under strain'". "Overworked telegraph clerks" then, "overworked postal workers" now. Things haven't changed so much from then til now!

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Hard to dislike December 18, 2008

By E.B.

Format:Paperback

A doomed empire tottering on the edge, the old ways starting to crumble and the new order beginning to assert itself. All of this in the sunny foreground while the unmistakable dark storm of catastrophe rumbles on the horizon. With such terrific raw material it would be hard to go wrong. But, to Ms. Nicholson's credit, she adds a delightful sense of humour, an eye for quixotic detail, sensitivity and obvious compassion, to craft an informative and very entertaining read. It's great fun. But it is also a sobering reality check. A colourful portrait of folly that so often precedes the fall.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Recaptures the summer of Edwardian/Georgian transition August 7, 2007

By Ronald H. Clark VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

The author, granddaughter of Vita Sackville West and Harold Nicholson, and daughter of Nigel Nicholson ("Portrait of a Marriage'), has written really two books in one. Her focus is the summer of 1911, when things were going swimmingly for the British and their empire. What a difference the next few years would make, with the advent of the Great War. The first half or so of the book focuses upon, what Morley Safer used to call, "everybody's favorite eccentrics" the British upper class. Here the emphasis is on shooting parties, the upcoming coronation of George V, debutants, weekend house parties at country homes, and basically filling all that time when one had virtually unlimited money and nothing much to do. I enjoyed this section very much, as I find this topic quite interesting. But then the focus and tone change in the second half of the book--the author concentrates her attention on some of the more unpleasant aspects of this period when one percent of the population owned 60% of the country. Those topics include the way of life of the lower classes (30% fell below the level of barest necessity); labor strikes and disruption; and the very deprived condition of those "in service" (who constituted 16% of the labor force). These disparities are so severe one wonders if the Great War actually foreclosed some manner of domestic insurrection. There is also interwoven throughout discussion of some of the technical changes that Britian was undergoing: airplanes; cinema; automobiles; and subways for example. The book is not meant as a scholarly treatment, although the author's bibliography indicates the substantial amount of research she has undertaken. Also helpful are a listing of the "dramatis personae" so you don't get confused as to who is who, and some helpful illustrations.... The author's style is most pleasant to read and the book is quite informative. An interesting book on a very crucial period in British history. Read more ›