Girlitude

by Emma Tennant

A memoir of the 50s and 60s from the author of the highly-acclaimed Strangers .


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography

216 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Since the early 1970s, when she was in her mid-thirties, Emma Tennant has been a prolific novelist and has established herself as one of the leading British exponents of "new fiction." This does not mean that she is an imitator of either the French nouveaux romanciers or the American post-modernists, although her work reveals an indebtedness to the methods and preoccupations of some of the latter. Like them, she employs parody and rewriting, is interested in the fictiveness of fiction, appropriates some science-fiction conventions, and exploits the possibilities of generic dislocation and mutation, especially the blending of realism and fantasy. Yet, although parallels can be cited and influences suggested, her work is strongly individual, the product of an intensely personal, even idiosyncratic, attempt to create an original type of highly imaginative fiction.

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

The second in a loose trilogy of memoirs, Scottish author and editor Emma Tennant reflects on her life from 18 to 30, from the eve of her coming-out ball where she poses for Anthony Armstrong-Jones – later to marry Princess Margaret – through to the first of her ill-fated marriages. The first of four husbands is Sebastian who introduces her to a family almost as renowned and eccentric as her own, dominated by his “ash and drink-stained father” Henry, better known as novelist Henry Green. Tennant drifts through the 50s and 60s, attempting to escape what she fears may be a Madame-Bovary-like fate. Her travels take her to Paris during May ’68, and her home in bustling, fashionable Chelsea brings her into contact with a host of literary and artistic figures from Bruce Chatwin to Andy Warhol, novelist Elaine Dundy and Henrietta Moraes - one-time muse of Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon. Tennant works to dispel images of herself as yet anpther, empty-headed, society woman, partly through her own refusal to assume the role expected of her; and partly because of an unusually modern perspective on gender and identity. And, as in earlier accounts of her experiences, she takes pains to include figures often overlooked in memoirs of this kind: particularly the Peter Quint-like, family butler who excels in seducing female staff, and the fading Nanny Trusler now installed in Tennant's parent's London mansion. It’s not as richly textured as her earlier Strangers but still very readable.

Rating: 2.5

[Bill Kupersmith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only vaguely was I aware as I read Lady in Waiting that Lady Glenconner was the half-sister-in-law to the author of The Colour of Rain, a novel I’d recently read, as Emma Tennant was scarcely mentioned. As one of the few Yanks who understands why the former was Lady Anne Coke before married but the latter was merely the Honourable Amy Tennant (daughters of earls take precedence over daughters of mere barons), I appreciated the irony of both women being chucked out of their childhood homes by the laws of primogeniture. Such is the fate of the daughters of the nobility when the family seat passes to the male heir to the title—perhaps a brother, perhaps if without a brother to a distant cousin one had never met. ‘My sister-in-law shows us we aren’t welcome’, Emma remarks of being exiled from Glen, the family’s Victorian pile in Scotland that resembles something from Disney World.

Even had I not read The Colour of Rain and Lady in Waiting, I’d have been attracted to Girlitude by its setting. The world of our transition from adolescence to young-adulthood may be the most vivid in our lives; I still drive motorcars that at least superficially resemble vehicles of the period between the Suez Crisis and the Profumo Scandal, though much safer and more reliable, thank Heavens. Amy’s girlhood extended to that terrible year 1968, involving three husbands, Sebastian a son of the novelist known as Henry Green, the satirist Christopher Booker who founded Private Eye (I loved his ‘climate scepticism’ and his The Seven Basic Plots), and the leftish journalist Alexander Cockburn. She also encountered numerous Americans including Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, and Terry Southern. Her life in Italy reads like an Antonioni movie. I enjoyed the account of writing The Colour of Rain; the characters were indeed based on young married people Amy knew, which is why she published it under a pseudonym. I might reread it to try to guess which character is Lady Antonia Fraser. But I doubt I’ll read any more of Amy Tennant, though there is a sequel featuring her affair with Ted Hughes (which surely qualified her to write a book on Ted and Sylvia!) Actually, looking at Amy Tennant’s bibliography, I suspect she never really found a genre that suited her, going in for Jane Austen and other knockoffs from the classics. But I very much enjoyed being reminded what a privilege it has been to have lived at that time.

[Lynda · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Fascinating name dropper of a book

[Umi · Rating 2 out of 5]

If only she wrote as much like Nancy Mitford as she's afraid she does.