Tag: NetGalley

#BookReview Untitled: The Real Wallis Simpson by Anna Pasternak

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UntitledAbout the Book

Who was the real Wallis: an opportunistic American social climber, a master manipulator or the true love of Edward’s life? Amid the cacophony of condemnation her story has become obfuscated. Untitled is an intimate biography of one of the most misunderstood women in British royal history.

His charisma and glamour ensured him the status of a rock star prince. Yet Edward gave up the British throne, the British Empire and his position as Emperor of India, to marry his true love, American divorcee Wallis Simpson.

So much gossip and innuendo has been levelled at Wallis Simpson that it has become nearly impossible to discern the real woman. Many have wondered why, when Edward could have had anyone he desired, he was smitten with this unusual American woman. As her friend Herman Rogers said to her in 1936 when news of her affair with Edward broke: ‘Much of what is being said concerns a woman who does not exist and never did exist.’

History is mostly perceived from the perspective of his-story. But what about her story? Anna Pasternak’s new book is the first ever to give Wallis a chance and a voice to show that she was a warm, loyal, intelligent woman adored by her friends, who was written off by cunning, influential Establishment men seeking to diminish her and destroy her reputation. As the author argues, far from being the villain of the abdication, she was the victim.

Anna Pasternak is appearing at Henley Literary Festival 2019

Format: e-book (369 pp.)    Publisher: William Collins
Published: 7th March 2019   Genre: Biography, History, Nonfiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Untitled: The Real Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor on Goodreads

My Review

Anna Pasternak nails her colours pretty unashamedly to the mast when she talks about the book being fuelled by a desire to rehabilitate Wallis in history. Untitled paints the Duchess of Windsor in a positive light, putting forward her side of the story and attempting to quash some, if not all, of the accusations that have been levelled at her. The list of sources and references at the back of the book demonstrate the detailed research undertaken by the author.

I was surprised to learn of the extremes to which the government went in their opposition to the relationship between Edward and Wallis Simpson, including listening in to their private telephone conversations.

However, I was left with a picture of two people so wrapped up in each other that the impact of their actions on others ceased to matter or just simply did not occur to them. At times, the behaviour of Wallis and Edward was either naive or bordered on the crass and their lavish lifestyle was far removed from the experience of the majority of Edward’s subjects. However, no-one with any feelings would surely wish for them the sadness of their final years – declining health, exile and manipulation by others.

Untitled is also the story of a family torn apart by a decision regarded variously as an act of selfishness, betrayal and a failure of duty. The author depicts how the refusal by his mother, Queen Mary, to receive Wallis or even acknowledge her and the decision not to grant the Duchess HRH status became totemic issues for Edward, creating a rift in the Royal Family that was never repaired in his lifetime.

In the Afterword, the author observes that she found herself warming to Edward during the process of researching and writing the book. I’m afraid this reader had the opposite experience. If anything, Edward comes out diminished to my mind. His blind devotion to Wallis is touching but tainted by his seemingly single-minded belief that he should have whatever he wanted in life, regardless of the consequences. As the author observes, ‘His love for Wallis was as selfish and as crucial to his survival as a child’s; it would have been the more loving act to have relinquished her‘.

As for Wallis? I think the author sums it up when she comments, ‘She [Wallis] was powerful – in her effect on Edward – but powerless, in her inability to prevent events from spiralling out of control’.

I received a review copy courtesy of William Collins via NetGalley.

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In three words: Fascinating, detailed, intimate

Try something similar…Chanel’s Riviera: The Cote d’Azur in Peace and War, 1930 – 1944 by Anne de Courcy

About the Author

Anna Pasternak is an author, columnist and journalist. She writes regularly for Sunday Times Style, Conde Nast Traveller, Harper’s Bazaar, and others. She lives in Oxfordshire with her husband and daughter.

Book Review: Where The Hornbeam Grows by Beth Lynch

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where-the-hornbeam-growsAbout the Book

What do you do when you find yourself living as a stranger? When Beth Lynch moved to Switzerland, she quickly realised that the sheer will to connect with people would not guarantee a happy relocation.

Out of place and lonely, Beth knows that she needs to get her hands dirty if she is to put down roots. And so she sets about making herself at home in the way she knows best – by tending a garden, growing things. The search for a garden takes her across the country, through meadows and on mountain paths where familiar garden plants run wild, to the rugged hills of the Swiss Jura.

In this remote and unfamiliar place of glow worms and dormice and singing toads she learns to garden in a new way, taking her cue from the natural world. As she plants her paradise with hellebores and aquilegias, cornflowers and Japanese anemones, these cherished species forge green and deepening connections: to her new soil, to her old life in England, and to her deceased parents, whose Sussex garden continues to flourish in her heart.

Where The Hornbeam Grows is a memoir about carrying a garden inwardly through loss, dislocation and relocation, about finding a sense of wellbeing in a green place of your own, and about the limits of paradise in a peopled world. It is a powerful exploration by a dazzling new literary voice of how, in nurturing a corner of the natural world, we ourselves are nurtured.

Format: Hardcover, ebook (288 pp.)    Publisher: W&N
Published: 18th April 2019 Genre: Nonfiction, Memoir

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Where The Hornbeam Grows on Goodreads

My Review

Fellow gardeners will be familiar with the saying ‘Right plant, right place’. What we learn (usually through bitter experience) is that, however hard you try, if you put a plant in a place with the wrong amount of light, moisture or soil acidity it will never thrive. In Where The Hornbeam Grows, the author explores this notion through her own personal experience of being uprooted from her accustomed habitat and transplanted to somewhere new and entirely alien – in this case, Switzerland.

In the first part of the book, following the death of her parents, the author bids a nostalgic farewell to the garden where she grew up and makes the move to Zurich in Switzerland with her partner, Shaun. In a section entitled ‘Uprooted’, she describes the difficulty of adjusting to life in Zurich – the grayness and lack of green space – and to being without a garden, just a window box. The reader gets a very real sense of how important gardening and being in touch with nature has been to the author’s well-being. It’s in her DNA, as it were.

It becomes apparent that it’s not only the absence of a garden that contributes to the feeling of displacement. The author writes with insight (and some humour) about the difficulties she and Shaun face in integrating into Swiss society, whether that’s struggling to pick up linguistic nuances or navigating the intricacies of social customs and manners. I have to say it presents a picture of Switzerland as insular and rather unwilling to openly embrace people of other nations that I found quite surprising.

A trip to the Jura sees the couple finally light upon a place where they feel they can live and, importantly, build a home and a garden. It’s a place to which the author feels an immediate emotional connection. Beth Lynch describes how, over the next few years, she starts to create a garden. She writes evocatively about the plants, local wildlife and surrounding landscape.

There are many references to Milton’s Paradise Lost throughout the book, a work which the author has studied extensively. (The detailed references at the back of the book are testament to this academic rigour.) Talking about the garden in the Jura, she notes, ‘I think the garden led me back into Paradise Lost… because it is the poem of a gardener. One who gardens, who has an affinity for gardens, who thrives on small negotiations with the natural world. Organising, tending, eliciting, pruning: a garden, a poem.’

Although the author and her partner have found a home and a garden in an area they love, they still find themselves, despite their best efforts, set apart from the local community, what the author describes as ‘a cultural disconnect’. In the section entitled ‘The Limits of Paradise’ the author reflects on her realisation that she is lonely. ‘Not just alone… Lonely: lacking ‘conversation’, a being amongst people.’ She admits ‘in time you must acknowledge that you have failed to integrate, for this society is at odds with who you are… It’s a pity, and it is nobody’s fault.’ The couple reluctantly conclude they must leave Switzerland. ‘This is why, even with one another for society, paradise is not enough for Adam and Eve. Paradise is not enough for anyone.’

I loved Where The Hornbeam Grows not just because, as a gardener myself, I can’t imagine not being able to tend and nurture plants, but also because it provides a fascinating insight into the challenges people can face when moving to a new country. It’s also beautifully written with lovely descriptions of plants and the natural world.

I received a review copy courtesy of publishers, Weidenfield and Nicholson, and NetGalley.

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In three words: Insightful, moving, reflective

Try something similar…The Wild Remedy by Emma Mitchell

Beth LynchAbout the Author

Beth Lynch grew up in rural East Sussex. She read English at Cambridge and went on to complete a doctorate in seventeenth-century literature. For the next decade she worked as a lecturer, creating gardens in her spare time and ultimately training as a garden designer. She then moved unexpectedly to Switzerland, where she lived and gardened for seven years. She has recently returned to the UK. (Bio and photo credit: Orion Books author page)

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