Skip to main content

Lady in Waiting by Anne Glenconner review – fascinating portrait of English repression

The marriage and social milieu of Princess Margaret’s childhood friend reveals a vanished era of upper-class eccentricity

Being very common, I have something of a mania for aristo-lit: a passion for stories about big houses and the wanton eccentrics who inhabit them that began in childhood with Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, continued into my teenage years with all things Mitford, and now finds ongoing sustenance mostly in diaries (Chips Channon, I salute you, and all who sailed in you). Nevertheless, I have to admit to being somewhat unprepared for Lady in Waiting, in which Anne Glenconner muses on her stiff upper lip and how it saw her through a marriage lasting 54 years to a man whose idea of a honeymoon treat was to take her – a girl who had been a virgin only hours before – to a fleapit of a hotel to watch two strangers having sex (“That’s very kind, but no thank you,” she said when invited to join in). Is her memoir a horror show or a delightful entertainment? A manual for how to live, or how not to live? In truth, I’m not sure even she would know the answer to these questions.

The eldest child of the fifth Earl of Leicester, Glenconner was maid of honour at the Queen’s coronation and lady-in-waiting to her childhood friend Princess Margaret. She grew up at Holkham Hall in Norfolk – a house so huge that if the footmen put raw eggs in a bain-marie as they walked from kitchen to nursery, they’d be boiled on arrival – and, aged 23, married Colin Tennant, later Lord Glenconner, the owner of a Scottish castle called Glen and of the Caribbean island of Mustique. Tennant was, she tells us repeatedly, great fun and so generous. But it can’t have been too much fun when he deliberately trapped her in the fold-up bed in their cabin on a train, or when he took her to a cock fight (one of the cocks attached itself to her head, causing it to bleed; far from being sympathetic, he was furious that she’d ruined the betting).

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/35rLmaU
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

Elena Ferrante: ‘Solaris is not Tarkovsky’s best film, but it made the greatest impression on me’

Solaris is astonishing because the book that inspired it doesn’t seem to contain Tarkovsky’s film A film that I watch at least once a year is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris . I’ve loved all of Tarkovsky’s works, even the most difficult. Some I’ve seen in the cinema, others on television. I saw Andrei Rublev at the cinema, and on the big screen it was astonishing, its black-and-white extraordinary: I’ll probably never see it again in a cinema, but I hope that young people will have the opportunity. I also saw Solaris on the big screen – not Tarkovsky’s best film, but the one that made the greatest impression on me. I remember that it was advertised as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey – a completely misleading slogan. To see in it a cinematic contest between the US and the USSR was as silly as it was misleading. Kubrick’s marvellous film, with its imaginative force, would certainly win. But it doesn’t have even a hint of the desperation, of the sense of loss, that dominates Sol...
Post a Comment
Read more