Christmas present from Gill : )
From Persephonebooks.co.uk Like Miss Pettigrew, this 1937 novel is a fairy tale for grown-ups, but one ‘with an uneasy crash into social reality.’ Lady Rose Targenet, later created the Countess of Lochlule, marries Sir Hector, owner of the estate next to ‘Keepsfield’, the palatial Scottish mansion where she lives. But one day she meets someone on a park bench in Edinburgh… ‘It’s a little book about dreams and the hard world of money and position and their relations to one another. It’s also a love story and a love letter – to Scotland’ (Candia McWilliam). The Guardian called Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary ‘a curious, affecting confection of high Scots romance and social realism.’ It was a great favourite of Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother.
This was perfect reading for a quiet Sunday afternoon. Persephone 53 is a charming grown up fairy tale. Lady Rose is a romantic, and she carries that romanticism all her life, and it is this which shapes her destiny. This simple little novel also highlights quite tragically how inflexible and unforgiving was Victorian high society. This is also a novel about Scotland, Lady Rose is a proud and patriotic Scot – and the novel allows us a teasing glimpse of some of the beauties of Scotland before the modern world came along and trampled all over them.
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