Four French Holidays
Four popular novelists of the same generation each wrote a novel inspired by a holiday that the author spent in France. In the nineteen-fifties, Rumer Godden based The Greengage Summer on her recollections of her family’s 1923 battlefield-tour manqué in the Champagne region. Margery Sharp’s 1936 holiday in Southern France led to ‘Still Waters’ and The Nutmeg Tree: both the short story and the novel are set in and around the region of Aix-les-Bains. In 1955, Daphne Du Maurier first visited the department of Sarthe to research French family history; the novel The Scapegoat was the immediate result of the holiday. And in 1966, Stella Gibbons’ last trip to the continent took the form of a visit to an old friend in her summer home near Grenoble. The stay is obliquely reflected in The Snow-Woman, in which a similar holiday leads a never-married septuagenarian to experience a renaissance of sorts.
Anne Hall was born in Boston, Massachusetts and grew up in Seattle, Washington. She studied English and French and while working on a doctoral degree in French literature she moved permanently to France. She has taught at the universities of Tours and Aix-en-Provence. Fifteen years ago, her research into the Du Mauriers’ French ancestry led her from Provence back to the Centre-Val de Loire region, where she is still living and writing. Also published by Unicorn The Du Mauriers Just as They Were and Angela Thirkell: A Writer’s Life.