The Last Landlady: An English Memoir

Description

Award-winning biographer Laura Thompson pays homage to the English pub through the remarkable story of her grandmother, the first woman in England to be given a publican's license in her own name. Laura Thompson's grandmother Violet was one of the great landladies. Born in a London pub, she became the first woman to be given a publican's license in her own name and, just as pubs defined her life, she seemed to embody their essence. Laura spent part of her childhood in her grandmother's Home Counties establishment, mesmerised by the landlady's gift for creating the mix of the everyday and the theatrical that defined the pub's atmosphere, making it a unique reflection of the national character. Her memories of this time are just as intoxicating- beer and ash on the carpets in the morning, the deepening rhythms of mirth at night, the magical brightness of glass behind the bar... Through them she traces the story of the English pub, asking why it has occupied such a treasured position in our culture. But even Violet, as she grew older, recognised that places like hers were a dying breed, and Laura also considers the precarious future they face. Part memoir, part social history, part elegy, this book pays tribute to an extraordinary woman and the world she epitomized.

Laura Thompson attended stage school and Oxford University. She won the Somerset Maugham Award with her first book, The Dogs, and wrote two books about horse racing while living in Newmarket. Her biographical study of Nancy Mitford, Life in a Cold Climate, was published in 2003, followed by Agatha Christie- An English Mystery (2008), A Different Class of Murder- The Story of Lord Lucan (2014), and Take Six Girls- The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (2015). She now lives in Richmond.

'The award-winning Thompson turns her acute eye for detail on her own family in this gorgeous memoir of her indomitable grandmother, Vi, the first woman to hold a pub licence in England' Independent 'Just occasionally a book comes along that leaves you breathless with pleasure, admiration and a dash of envy too. The Last Landlady is Laura Thompson's exquisitely observed and brilliantly written memoir of the life and times of her grandmother, the first woman in England to hold a pub licence in her own right... Simply delicious' Mail on Sunday