The Flower and the Nettle

Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh

by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Their search for privacy took the Lindberghs from the United States to England and then France. Anne Lindbergh sets the record straight here on her husband's prewar visits to Germany. Introduction by the Author; Index; photographs. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Genres: Biography, Memoir, Diary, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir

605 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Anne Morrow Lindbergh was born in 1906. She married Charles Lindbergh in 1929 and became a noted aviator in her own right, eventually publishing several books on the subject and receiving several aviation awards. Gift from the Sea, published in 1955, earned her international acclaim. She was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame, the National Women’s Hall of Fame, and the Aviation Hall of Fame of New Jersey. War Within and Without, the penultimate installment of her published diaries, received the Christopher Award in 1980. Mrs. Lindbergh died in 2001 at the age of ninety-four.

Not to be confused with her daughter Anne Lindbergh.

Reviews

[Nicola Pierce · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful insight into the Lindberghs' lives and marriage. Anne is a writer of great sensitivity and intelligence and I thoroughly enjoyed her diaries and letters. In reading about their busy social life, I envied her conversational skills and also her talent for description. It was a thrill to see the likes of Lady Astor, Harold Nicholson and the Duke & Duchess of Wales up close. And I found their search for a home fascinating and relished in the fact that money was - really - no object. (I don't think I could have left Long Barn for anything.) I envied their freedom, choosing a city, a country, until, of course, war threatens and restricts everything in every way. As a writer, I loved reading about her work and problems with writing. Finally, I especially enjoyed the quotes from her conversations with the artist Charles Despiau as he sculpted her.

[Ann Aldrich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Composed entirely of journals and letters to her mother from 1936 to 1939, this lengthy volume captures the years the couple lived in England and France following the death of their first son. It is interesting for its documentation of an incredibly busy life style -- lunch, tea, and dinner with multiple famous people every day, plus trips to Germany and Russia where Charles surveyed military capacity for various allied countries. While Anne was a loving mother, it was the era when children were cared for by nannies and left behind for extended periods while the parents carried on with their lives.

The most powerful element, viewed from the benefit of 70 plus years of history, is the tension created throughout Europe by the build up toward WWII. Anne shared her husband's support of Chamberlin and appeasement. She states in the preface that she hopes her record will refute public opinion that Charles was a Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite, although she acknowledges discomfort with some of his positions. His activities during this period may have been defensible, but his public conduct in subsequent years left no doubt as to his commitment to isolationism and white supremacy. And then there was his private conduct. For a woman as reflective as Anne, being the dutiful, devoted wife to the man she idolized must have become increasingly difficult..

[Conniegull · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars

[Jeslyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally finished this volume of Anne's letters and diaries - I got distracted with other things. However, there were parts in this volume that dragged, in particular their time spent touring Russia's aviation advances - a chore to get through, and I felt for her being stuck in dull dinners and tours...(this section alone dropped a star from my rating!) This time frame in particular highlighted how difficult it must be to publish one's diaries, to have vulnerabilities, weaknesses and flaws exposed to the world. I could focus on the entries that frustrated me with her decision-making, time spent/not spent with kids, etc. but at the end I continued to find Anne to be an extraordinary, real human being who threw herself into multiple demanding roles, and juggled them to the very best of her ability, and I came away once again appreciating her efforts and loving her gorgeous insights on many different subjects.

[yeoman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Often interesting but disappointingly one dimensional. Anne seems to censor herself to the point of cold detachment. Disappointing, as the rest of her life would have made this a fascinating read, for me anway. Maybe that's why I'm still not through it yet.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

January 23, 2005

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is just tons of Jornal pages one after another. It is a small part of her life but I dont think I would ever read it again.

[Martha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have read my way through the Lindbergh marriage..very interesting...family with money yet read as though they were needy. a long marriage but then find a second and third family in Germany.

[LuAnn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look at the Lindberghs’ lives, the thinking about Germany in the run up to WWII among their high level social circles in England and France, and their travelS.

Anne still obviously greatly admires and defers to Charles at this point in their marriage and is filtering her perceptions and thoughts as a “public” person,as he requested earlier in her journaling, so you only feel you get to know her to a limited extent.

What I have to say next may make it sound like I didn’t enjoy this, but I did. It’s just that we carry such
awareness these days about privilege and disadvantage, I automatically noticed the signs of privilege and her taking it for granted. While I’ve had to remind myself that: a) they didn’t have this awareness then, b) her personal journal is going to be largely unfiltered, c) she’s the daughter of a well-to-do businessman and ambassador and he, a world famous aviator and son of a congressman and this is their milieu, since it stood out to me, I’m going to chronicle it below. It does make me wonder what their children think of their upbringing and how she came across to those who knew her.

They frequently dined with the elite of society, ambassadors, politicians, writers, artists, generals, the Astors, Vita Sackville-West (they rented her house Long Barn), Joseph and Rose Kennedy, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and his brother King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, Gertrude Stein, etc. She details her impression of these people in detailed judgments about their demeanor, conversation and her rapport with them. I wonder if she could really read people as well as she thinks she does. She shows disdain for people who aren’t perceived as interesting or intelligent. Yet often they flew themselves to these places in their old baggy flying clothes and once with an engine spurting oil on them and at times she felt shy and out of place.

Servants are mostly just there until they leave or cause her extra work to placate them, as with their nurse/nanny when they move to an unheated, unplumbed house on a tidal island off the coast of France. These servants enable hours of writing, furnishing homes, and being away from her two children for weeks on end as she travels with her husband while he assesses German air capability for the US government, or they visit Russia and India, so it’s funny to read her complaint about the endless questions, demands, attentiveness one requires one day when she doesn’t have help. (My partner and I raised and homeschooled five ourselves!) Yet she was involved in caring for her children and teaching her oldest to read.

The house on Île Iliec was so much work—redoing the grounds & house, purchasing suitable vintage furniture, hauling all supplies by boat or over rocky and muddy flats at low tide, enduring the wind, when she’s often lamenting there’s not enough time for writing and their lives are busy enough. Yet Charles science partner was on the neighboring island.

There’s also shopping for expensive(but not too) paintings for themselves and to give as gifts and sittings for sculptures and portraits from lesser known but still significant artists such as Vlaminck, Despiau, Jo Davison, Utrillo, Boudin.

Anne’s opinion about England’s approach to Hitler’s ambitions and actions, as well as that of many of the people of power she encounters, mentions no sensitivity to the people of the countries and areas that Germany takes over, except for one or two mentions of sympathy for the Jews. Yet they little knew what was going on and the horror was to come.

[Sharlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted to read this book again, not only because Anne Lindbergh is such a good writer, but because it covers the years before WWII. The Lindbergh's had fled to Europe for privacy after the tragic kidnapping and murder of their first son. Granted they were privileged and controversial, but they were in almost daily contact with the leaders of the world. You get a good picture of what was happening through their eyes.

[Leigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Out of all the volumes of this series, this one is the one I vividly remember reading. I can remember lying in bed on a lazy Sunday morning, or curled up before bed at night reading about the Lindberghs meeting so many of histories great and notorious figures. From the Prince of Wales soon to be the Duke of Windsor, his American divorcee future wife, to King George VI and his wife Elizabeth who would become a beloved figure throughout England in the years to come, and of course the Germans and Hermann Goering. This volume is the longest of the series and was the toughest to get through. Even Anne herself admits it while rereading her older diaries, saying her writing then had much more intensity to it. Yeah it did and while I enjoyed reading this volume there were moments I had to keep dragging my eyes back to the page. As always she was very vivid in her descriptions of the people and place she visited and you could feel like you were there a fly on the wall to these parties, events and just parts of her life in general. From fascinating descriptions of Long Barn and Illiec which had me looking up pictures on the internet to see the homes and their surroundings, to descriptions of the people she met. I found her Russia trip interesting when she described the people and places she visited there, but then Russia has always held a fascination for me and apparently it's not just the Romanov dynasty that holds my attention. However Anne does come across as almost painfully naive when talking about Hitler and Germany. Though she seems to be blindly following her husband and staunchly defending him throughout, his actions in the years to come tell another story and it would be interesting to see unedited versions of these diaries, and even to see what Anne's mother thought of her son in law. But Anne herself appears to still be in love with her husband. I guess that all starts to change in the next book and we all know what happened to their marriage in the postwar years. But still a solid fascinating look into this time period. Anne truly made history and many who made the headlines during this time come alive in vivid detail.

[Cynthia Sillitoe · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 really.

[Kathryn Hurn]

Read everything Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote and many works I learned about from reading her diaries I probably would have never discovered otherwise. Insightful, just plain lovely, honest about her own misgivings of motherhood competing with her art, her struggles with keeping up appearances being married to one of the most famous men in the universe, when what she wanted most was to think, write and care for her family.