Seducers in Ecuador & The Heir

Description

Two exquisite novellas which confirm Sackville-West's gift as a novelist Seducers in Ecuador is the story of Arthur Lomax, every bit the English gentleman in his white ducks and solar topee, enjoying the pleasures of an Egyptian cruise. But with the addition of a pair of blue spectacles to the outfit, Lomax's entire world changes - to alarming, deadly effect. Peregrine Chase in The Heir is the manager of a Wolverhampton insurance company. But when he inherits a moated Tudor house called Blackboys his resistance to change dissolves in the face of its beauty. Under the spell of house and garden, Peregrine's life - and heart - are transformed.

Vita Sackville-West was born in 1892 at Knole in Kent, the only child of aristocratic parents. In 1913 she married diplomat Harold Nicolson, with whom she had two sons and travelled extensively before settling at Kent's Sissinghurst Castle in 1930, where she devoted much of her time to creating its now world-famous garden. Throughout her life Sackville-West had a number of other relationships with both men and women, and her unconventional marriage would later become the subject of a biography written by her son Nigel Nicolson. Though she produced a substantial body of work, amongst which are writings on travel and gardening, Sackville-West is best known for her novels The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931), and for the pastoral poem The Land (1926), which was awarded the prestigious Hawthornden Prize. Sackville-West died on 2 June 1962 at her Sissinghurst home, aged seventy.

My own favourite, the wry whimsical little Seducers in Ecuador -- Katherine Swift * The Times *