Banished by her mother to England, Barbara is thrown into the ordered formality of English life. Confused and unhappy, she discovers the wrecked and flowering wastes around St Paul's, where she finds an echo of the wilderness of Provence and is forced to confront the wilderness within herself.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
This novel about a 17-year-old girl's move from a fishing village in France to London in the aftermath of WW II was first published in 1950.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
“Poignant and inspiring.” -- SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lost in the ruins of postwar London,
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This review is from: The World My Wilderness (Virago Modern Classics) (Paperback)
Barbary has been living happily with her divorced mother in the south of France, and has spent the war years as a junior member of the Resistance. Apparently she has been involved in the murder of her French stepfather, considered by the Reistance to be a collaborator, so her mother banishes her to london to live with the father she hasn't seen since she was a young child. She escapes from the tedium of her father's very conventional household with her stepbrother Raoul, and together they explore the London bombsites, and meet the people who hide there, army deserters and black marketeers. Barbary longs to return to France and her adored mother, but will her mother ever forgive her for her part in her stepfather's death? Barbary is a fascinating character, a teenager old beyond her years, intense and fierce, and hopelssly lost in her father's narrow, conventional world. Not as funny as some of Rose macaulay's other novels, but a fascinating and absorbing story.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A fascinating main character,
By Hoodlum (Frederick, MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The World My Wilderness (Virago Modern Classics) (Paperback)
Not as strong as The Towers of Trebizond but a great read nonetheless. This is the novel that Macaulay--one of a number of now relatively unsung British women novelists of the 1950s who were so good (inc. Barbara Pym, Pamela Hansford Johnson, et al.)--wrote after her friends thought she'd given up novel-writing. It's an absorbing tale. The central character is someone who grows on you and your heart aches for her. The novel well conveys a world that is now invisible to tourists visiting London: the wreckage and ruin, physical and human, in the period immediately following the conclusion of the Second World War. Things have changed; morality and religion are not what they were. Macaulay knew this London well and her sentences are well constructed, her writing clear and effective, often beautiful. It's a novel that is well worth spending time with.
0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
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The World My Wilderness,
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
THE villa, facing south, stood above the little town and port, on the slope between the sea and the Foret de Sorede. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Sir Gulliver, Sir Angus, Madame Michel, Somerset Chambers, Addle Street, Noble Street, Fore Street, Miss Barbary, Monkwell Street, Lady Maxwell, Villa Fraises, Silver Street, Loch Dubh, Lucien Michel, Gresham Street, Père Richaud, Foster Lane, Monsieur Richie, Nurse Ryan, Uncle Angus, Uncle Bert New!
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Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
THE villa, facing south, stood above the little town and port, on the slope between the sea and the Foret de Sorede. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Sir Gulliver, Sir Angus, Madame Michel, Somerset Chambers, Addle Street, Noble Street, Fore Street, Miss Barbary, Monkwell Street, Lady Maxwell, Villa Fraises, Silver Street, Loch Dubh, Lucien Michel, Gresham Street, Père Richaud, Foster Lane, Monsieur Richie, Nurse Ryan, Uncle Angus, Uncle Bert New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 18
books:
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11
books
cite this book:
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- Full House by Molly Keane in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- The Dud Avocado (Vintage Signet, D1915) by Elaine Dundy in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- Loving without Tears (Virago Modern Classics) by Molly Keane in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- George Eliot: Centenary Essays and an Unpublished Fragment (Barnes and Nobel Critical Studies) by Anne Smith in Back Matter
- FROST IN MAY (Virago Modern Classics) by Antonia White in Back Matter
See all 18 books this book cites
- Women's Fiction Between the Wars Pb by Heather Ingman on 12 pages
- Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity by Deborah L. Parsons on 5 pages
- In Ruins by Christopher Woodward on 4 pages
- L'oeuvre de Rosamond Lehmann: Sa contribution au roman feminin (1927-1952) (French Edition) by Marie-Jose Codaccioni on page 172, page 173, and page 380
- The Afterlife: Essays and Criticism by Penelope Fitzgerald in Front Matter, page 212, and page 215
See all 11 books citing this book
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