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Rose Tremain

Rosie: Scenes from a Vanished Life Hardcover – International Edition, September 25, 2018

by Rose Tremain (Author)

4.0 949 ratings

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Rose Tremain grew up in post-war London, a city of grey austerity, still partly in ruins, where both food and affection were fiercely rationed. The girl known then as ‘Rosie’ and her sister Jo spent their days longing for their grandparents' farm, buried deep in the Hampshire countryside, a green paradise of feasts and freedom, where they could at last roam and dream.

But when Rosie is ten years old, everything changes. She and Jo lose their father, their London house, their school, their friends, and -- most agonisingly of all -- their beloved Nanny, Vera, the only adult to have shown them real love and affection.

Briskly dispatched to a freezing boarding-school in Hertfordshire, they once again feel like imprisoned castaways. But slowly the teenage Rosie escapes from the cold world of the Fifties, into a place of inspiration and mischief, of loving friendships and dedicated teachers, where a young writer is suddenly ready to be born.

Print length

208 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Chatto & Windus
Publication date

September 25, 2018
Dimensions

5.67 x 0.94 x 8.03 inches
ISBN-10

1784742279
ISBN-13

978-1784742270
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Rose Tremain’s novels and short stories have been published in thirty countries and have won several awards, including the Orange Prize (The Road Home), the Dylan Thomas Award (The Colonel's Daughter and Other Stories), the Whitbread Novel of the Year (Music & Silence) and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (Sacred Country). Her most recent novel,The Gustav Sonata, was a Sunday Times Top Ten Bestseller. It won the National Jewish Book Award in the US, the South Bank Sky Arts Award in the UK and was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award. Rose Tremain was made a CBE in 2007. She lives in Norfolk and London with the biographer, Richard Holmes.

www.rosetremain.co.uk

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Chatto & Windus (September 25, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1784742279
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1784742270
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.67 x 0.94 x 8.03 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,210,242 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #15,502 in Author Biographies
- #30,201 in Women's Biographies
- #88,533 in Memoirs (Books)

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4.0 949 ratings

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Customer reviews

4 out of 5

949 global ratings

5 star		44%
4 star		29%
3 star		17%
2 star		6%
1 star		3%

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Top review from the United States

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Aase Elkott

Honest and deeply moving

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 14, 2018

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Rose Tremain writes an honest and deeply moving story of her own life and what made her who she is. The inability of her parents to provide love and care for their two daughters is replaced by a beloved nanny who is able to give the two girls all the love that the parents cannot give them. Hence this story of her own life reflects the inner life of Tremain's characters. An honest and deeply moving story of how Tremain finds love and support in a much loved teacher. A delightful story of survival and growth as a person and an artist.

2 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Sabina

An engaging memoir

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 8, 2018

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Rose Tremain's memoir chronicles a paradoxical upbringing of privilege and deprivation. Visits to her grandparents' Linkenholt Manor in Hampshire were 'paradise,' but her parents divorced and were self-absorbed, and being sent away to boarding school was no picnic. The saving grace for Rosie and sister Jo was their 'angel' nanny whom they called Nan. This meant that their childhood wasn't quite devoid of adult love.
Written with her usual eye for visual and emotional detail, unsentimental but not afraid of describing strong feeling, this is a pleasurable and speedy read. Rose made the best of the Swiss finishing school her mother forced on her (instead of Oxford), but encouraged by her English teacher and recognising her own need to become a writer, she persevered along her chosen path. If she writes more about that, I will certainly read it.

17 people found this helpful

D Osborne-Pursglove

Evocative

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 10, 2018

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An evocative description of a personal life but also of a vanished way of life. Rose Tremain writes beautifully and I was fully engrossed by her poignant story from the beginning until the end. In fact, I didn't want it to end so I hope that she writes a full autobiography of her life. My own mother has recently died and she was similar to Rose's - distant, cold. This combined with the fact that I have a very different background - growing up in the '60's in a poor area of Portsmouth, made for fascinating reading. Rose's story highlights the fact that wealth doesn't guarantee that you will be happy - a loving, secure home is much more important. It also shows how our early lives shape our later lives. I ended up as a secretary which is the very thing that Rose became determined to escape. How well she did.

15 people found this helpful

gammyjill

Excellent memoir...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 20, 2018

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Rose Tremain,British author of many novels and short stories, has written a short memoir of the early years of her life. I think people write memoirs in an attempt to understand their lives; putting down events and reminisces of the people they've known can bring clarity to their "history". Rose writes about her family - divorced parents and eccentric relatives - and life in post-WW2 Britain. She begins at birth and ends in her late teens.

Rose Tremain was born "Rosemary" but was known as "Rosie". Her parents - both rather eccentric in that uniquely British way - split early in Rosie's life. Her mother was indifferent to her two daughters and their upbringing was left to her beloved "Nan", who provided the hands-on love and attention most parents give their children. She was sent to a boarding school at eight where she made friends, did fairly well scholastically, and began to look at the artistic side of life. She wanted to go to Oxford, but her mother sent her to a Swiss "finishing school". The book ends when she seizes control of her life and enrolls at the Sorbonne. Tremain notes in the text when she's used her own life experiences in her novels and short stories.

I never tell someone to buy a memoir. Any memoir. Memoirs tend to be intensely individual and the reader often reads something she really doesn't want to know. "TMI", you know what I mean. I will only say about Rose Tremain's memoir is interesting and well-written. But, if you're not interested in the person and the times she writes about, you won't like "Rosie". If you are interested in post-WW2 Britain, as I am, the book is probably for you.

7 people found this helpful

Ninaminacat

One of the best written autobiographies I have ever read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 27, 2021

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This is a raw autobiography which really allows the reader to feel the author's pain. Some of the events which she describes are shocking and heart-rending - experiences which no young girl should have to suffer. I sincerely hope the rest of Rose Tremain's life has been considerably happier; she certainly deserves it to have been after such a hard start. Although her childhood and adolescent years were far from idyllic (she would probably not have needed to produce an autobiography, had that been the case) her account is not self-indulgent. It is, of course, well written and, which I found particularly interesting, contains footnotes which indicate where she has used an incident in a novel or short story. I thoroughly recommend this autobiography and give it 5 stars without the slightest reservation.

One person found this helpful

John D

An illuminating memoire of a past youth

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 1, 2018

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I admire Rose Tremain's novels. She has a simplicity of style that conveys complex nuances of emotion and character with great power, and her tales take place in imaginative scenarios.
This book is very different. It is autobiographical, but is not simply a narrative description of a childhood and adolescence. I believe she is trying to tell us how her childhood has moulded the person she is now, and how it has influenced her novels. She even recounts how incidents from her childhood have reappeared in her novels.
The example I remember most is a trip into the forests in the Swiss mountains with her fellow finishing school student, eating wild strawberries reappearing as a key point in her novel "The Gustav Sonata" where Gustav and Anton as boys find an abandoned hospital for consumptives above the tree line in Switzerland.
Although she says that writers should not write only about what they know, but use their imagination to recreate something new, this book almost contradicts that. I feel I know the novelist much better, at least I know more of who she is as a person, but also how a privileged but cold upbringing has influenced the characters she paints so well.
Rose Tremain writes of the human condition with great strength-maybe only some aspects of that condition, and certainly her situations are most convincing when her characters are conditioned to appreciate beauty in art.
I have to say that her novels are of greater stature than this book. Knowing the background to them better is worthwhile but in the end less interesting and involving.
And I have to say that her mother seems to me to have been a more interesting person than that described so critically here-she may have been a poor mother, but she obviously led a colourful life full of contact with colourful people, not least Rose Tremain's father and stepfather.
She maybe owes more than she will admit to the way these three handled her childhood.

3 people found this helpful

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Rosie: Scenes from a Vanished Life Hardcover – International Edition, September 25, 2018

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