Four French Holidays | Signed by the author

Rumer Godden, Daphne du Maurier, Stella Gibbons, Margery Sharp and their novels inspired by France

By Anne Hall
Introduction by Hugh Schofield

We are delighted to announce that Anne Hall’s masterpiece - Four French Holidays (published by Unicorn in 2023) - is now available through Manderley Press.

Anne Hall helped us to launch our new edition of Rumer Godden’s China Court (at Lamb House, Rye, in December 2023), and we are thrilled to now have copies of her book in our online shop - perfect for readers whose interest is piqued by the influence of France on the writing of these grandes dames of mid-century British literature.

These four popular novelists of the same generation each wrote a novel inspired by a holiday that the author spent in France. In the 1950s, Rumer Godden based The Greengage Summer on her recollections of her family’s 1923 battlefield-tour manqué in the Champagne region. Margery Sharp’s 1936 holiday in Southern France led to ‘Still Waters’ and The Nutmeg Tree: both the short story and the novel are set in and around the region of Aix- les-Bains. In 1955, Daphne du Maurier first visited the department of Sarthe to research French family history; the novel The Scapegoat was the immediate result of the holiday. And in 1966, Stella Gibbons’ last trip to the continent took the form of a visit to an old friend in her summer home near Grenoble. The stay is obliquely reflected in The Snow-Woman, in which a similar holiday leads a never-married septuagenarian to experience a renaissance of sorts.

“Through the prism of visits to France in the novels and stories of these writers, Anne Hall explores the delicate and subtle interplay of relations between those two nations in fiction. It is elegantly written, illuminating and informative. There is some fascinating original scholarship here, but, above all, Four French Holidays is highly entertaining and tempts you to go and read for yourself (if you haven’t already) or re-read the works under consideration.”
– Reggie Oliver, nephew and biographer of Stella Gibbons

“In a delicate, enthralling feat of literary detective work, Anne Hall explores the reality behind one of Rumer Godden’s best books on her greatest theme, the loss of innocence. This skilful disentangling of how life and fiction combine is a compelling story in its own right.”
– Anne Chisholm, author, critic and biographer of Rumer Godden

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anne Hall was born in Boston, Massachusetts and grew up in Seattle, Washington. She studied English and French and while working on a doctoral degree in French literature she moved permanently to France. She has taught at the universities of Tours and Aix-en-Provence. Fifteen years ago, her research into the Du Mauriers’ French ancestry led her from Provence back to the Centre-Val de Loire region, where she is still living and writing. She is also the author of The Du Mauriers Just as They Were and Angela Thirkell: A Writer’s Life.