 Walled Gardens
Annabel Davis-Goff
Scenes from an Irish childhood Pages: 255
ISBN: 9781906011024
Area of interest: Ireland
Genre: Biography, Irish Interest Date of first publication: 1990
Eland publication date: January 1, 1994
Price: £12.99
Walled Gardens is a journey both in time and place – to the south of Ireland in the 1940s and 50s. An Irish household, too late to benefit from the last years of the Ascendancy, yet too early to integrate into the mainstream of Irish life, clings to a charmed but ruinous way of life. A deteriorating house, bereft of central heating and dotted with pails to catch rain from the leaking roof, deteriorates in the hands of inexperienced servants drawn from the local cottages or impoverished small farms. Outlandish and impractical schemes to make money, to maintain a life of fox-hunting and horse-racing, fail as surely as a marriage. Annabel Davis-Goff's account of her family and childhood is evocative, moving and sometimes very funny.
biography of Annabel Davis-Goff
extract from Walled Gardens
‘Vividly entertaining … written with a quality of mercy added to the acute perceptions of a child'
Molly Keane
Spectator
Her narrative has a quality of brilliant social anthropology … she writes with delicacy of touch and beauty of style.
John Keegan
Daily Telegraph A fine evocation of a lost race, and a testament to the humanity which is common to us all.
John Wyse Jackson
Sunday Times
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