Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady

Description

"When the War drove her to fill the house with strange guests, it also drove her to fill her diary with strange thoughts... This broadened hospitality, and these unaccustomed contacts, completely changed for the time the character of English country life."In this fascinating work, Edith Olivier explores the diaries left to her by her friend and neighbour, Miss Emma Nightingale. The account explores the arrival of both evacuees and soldiers to Miss Nightingale's village after the outbreak of World War II. Her musings on acting as a boarding house during this time are vivid and appealing chronicles of both rural life in World War II, and the varied and engaging individuals who were involved in this great struggle.This is a record of the war as told through the people left behind in England to live their lives against its all-encompassing backdrop, and who did so with quiet contemplation and an overwhelming sense of hospitality.

Edith Olivier (1872-1948) was born in the Rectory at Wilton, Wiltshire, in the late 1870s. Her father was Rector there and later Canon of Salisbury. She came from an old Huguenot family which had been living in England for several generations, and was one of a family of ten children. She was educated at home until she won a scholarship to St Hugh's College, Oxford. Her first novel, The Love Child, was published in 1927 and there followed four works of fiction: As Far as Jane's Grandmother's (1928), The Triumphant Footman (1930), Dwarf's Blood (1930) and The Seraphim Room (1932). Her works of non-fiction were The Eccentric Life of Alexander Cruden (1934), Mary Magdalen (1934), Country Moods and Tenses (1941), Four Victorian Ladies of Wiltshire (1945), Night Thoughts of a Country Landlady (1945), her autobiography, Without Knowing Mr. Walkley (1938) and, posthumously published, Wiltshire (1951). Edith Olivier spent her life within twenty miles of her childhood home, and died in her beloved Wilton in 1948.

Sadly Miss Nightingale did not see the war come to an end, and many of those she cared for did not have the chance to thank her. But she could not have a finer memorial than this lovely little book. https://fleurfisher.wordpress.com/