Mary Berenson: a self-portrait from her letters & diaries

by Barbara Strachey; Jayne Samuels (eds.), Barbara Strachey (Editor)

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

319 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

Reviews

[James F]

This is an example of what I usually think of as a nineteenth-century genre, the “Life and Letters”. The editors are Mary’s granddaughter Barbara Strachey, about seventy when this was written, and who possessed most of the letters and diaries of her grandmother, and Jayne Samuels, whose husband Ernest wrote the biography of Bernard Berenson that I read last month.

Unlike the two biographies I read of her husband, this contained almost nothing about the Berensons’ views of art, and so to be honest it was somewhat of a waste of time for me, since that was what I was interested in. Instead, it is a witty but gossipy book about her love affairs, her husband’s love affairs, their dysfunctional relationship and many quarrels, and the various celebrities, friends, enemies and “frenemies” who occupied their time and attention at their villa. It did present an overview of the relationships among the English and American émigré non-academic intellectual mileux of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but again without much about their ideas.