ENID BAGNOLD'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

by Enid Bagnold ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 25, 1970

At one point Enid Bagnold defines a woman of spirit, which she so remarkably represents, as a person with ""an extra dose of life."" It magnifies every page. A slow starter to begin with (in spite of several civilizing continental schools) when she came out she was as ""raw as a broken egg""; but enduring to prove that the best of life is yet to be, writing her elusively brilliant plays in her middle sixties and on, and now her autobiography at eighty. Her life sell-divides itself in several phases: the first in London, aesthetic, where she knew many writers and artists and where she herself drew and wrote and looked for everything--""life, experience, a dead partridge, an ashbin"" and also fell in love with the ugly, magnetic Frank Harris. Then she went home to enjoy a more aristocratic world right next door. At thirty, she married, or rather was married by the insistent Roderick, ""an irrevocable man and what he wanted went""--the head of Reuter's for whom she maintained a large and perfectly appointed household and then there were the four children. All kinds of people casually circulate through the pages: Katherine Mansfield and Lovat Fraser and Kipling; Cynthia Asquith with her ""chestnut Romney loveliness""; the Nicolsons and Smuts; and in the last years theatre people--particularly Laughton and the Lunts. There are affecting relationships throughout: her childhood and her reciprocally loving mother; her life with Roderick in which he quarreled with her, admired her and indulged her and his ""tissue-paper"" dying; and her hardwon success in the theatre--""I was not a born writer but I was born a writer."" Throughout there's her determination, her solipsism, but her directness--she's a commanding presence which gives her book its striking immediacy.

Pub Date: Aug. 25, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown--A.M.P.

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1970

Categories: NONFICTION