Yesterday Morning: A Very English Childhood

Description

Yesterday Morning is a vivid recollection of Diana Athill's joyful beginnings. It is also a remarkable insight into a now vanished world; this is England in the 1920s, seen with a clear and unsentimental eye from the vantage point of the 21st century. Growing up in a Norfolk country house with servants, Athill's upbringing was rich and loving: filled with the pleasures of horse riding and the unfolding secrets of adults and sex. However, here, she probes these foundations, asking: does privilege equate to happiness?

DIANA ATHILL was born in 1917. She helped Andre Deutsch establish the publishing company that bore his name and worked as an editor for Deutsch for four decades. She is the author of eight volumes of memoirs - Stet, Instead of a Letter, After a Funeral, Yesterday Morning, Make Believe, Somewhere Towards the End, Alive, Alive Oh!, A Florence Diary - a collection of letters, Instead of a Book, and a novel, Don't Look At Me Like That, all published by Granta, as well as a collection of short stories, Midsummer Night in the Workhouse (Persephone Books). In January 2009, she won the Costa Biography Award for Somewhere Towards the End, and was presented with an OBE. She died in January 2019.

A joy to read from start to finish * Sunday Independent * Athill's astringent prose has the remarkable quality of making one look forward to old age * Evening Standard * Yesterday Morning is a captivating book. It is as if she had set out with a butterfly net to catch everything about her early life in an upper-middle-class English family before it - or she - vanished: the beloved grand house in Norfolk, the servants, her unhappily married parents. -- Kate Kellaway * Guardian * Athill's honesty in describing her feelings as a young girl and old woman makes her memoir universal. * The Independent * Athill's writing is like a really good apple: crisp, juicy, at once sweet and tart. She describes youthful games and discoveries in a voice that manages to combine delighted immediacy and ironic distance....The book feels at times like a grab bag, a collection of all the odds and ends Athill traces to her early years * The New York Times Book Review * A compulsively readable memoir of a golden age * The Times * Athill has added importantly to those works of literature which illuminate the vagaries of human emotion. * Daily Telegraph *