DIVIDED LOYALTIES

by Janet Teissier du Cros ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

Out of the war years comes this memoir of life as a wife and mother in occupied France. Janet Teissier du Cros was also something more: she was a Scotswoman carried to a Frenchman, and as such she found herself enmeshed in a web of dual loyalties. In France she faced far more hostility as a Briton than Americans would be likely to suspect: the innate suspicion of old enmity, the attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir in 1940, the handling of Dunkirk all contributed to it. But what Mme. Teissier du Cros writes of in the main are the trials of existence, both in Southern France, where her husband's family lived, and in Paris, where she joined her husband Francois after his release from German imprisonment. There are endless journeys back and forth with the children, constant forays for food, the determined joy of shared Christmases. The author bore her third son during this period, and endured risk that would not have existed in normal times. The progress of the war against the story of private lives is a dull throb, bursting into the foreground toward the close with the Allied, landing in Normandy, the resistance of the maquis coming into the open at last (with a memorable celebration of July 14, 1944 at Valleraugue), the return to a liberated Paris. Chattily recalled, yet undramatic in its hold on the everyday, this is for women who will respond to the detail of daily life under stress--perhaps less compelling in its main message to Americans than to their British cousins.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1964

Categories: NONFICTION