« Ce livre évoque sept générations de femmes d'une même famille, ma famille. J'ai choisi l'ordre chronologique pour me pencher sur ces femmes apparentées par le sang ou les liens du mariage et voir ainsi quelles conclusions pouvaient être tirées de leurs histoires collectives. Je voulais essayer de les comprendre, de leur être reconnaissante là où je devais l'être, de leur pardonner là où je le pouvais. »Dans ces mémoires familiaux, Juliet Nicolson, la petite-fille de Vita Sackville-West, enquête sur le sens du souvenir. Des quartiers pauvres de Malaga au XIXe siècle à l'Angleterre frappée par la Seconde Guerre mondiale et le New York des années 1980, le lecteur pénètre progressivement un milieu - l'aristocratie anglaise éclairée - aussi admiré que critiqué.Dans les pleins et les déliés de ces destins liés, pas un instant on ne s'ennuie. Clémentine Goldszal, Elle.Ces portraits, fourmillant d'anecdotes et de vie, permettent de traverser les rêves que chacune a nourris. Sabine Audrerie, La Croix. Traduit de l'anglais par Éric Chédaille.
'As page-turning as a novel' Joanna Trollope One summer of nearly a hundred years ago saw one of the high sunlit meadows of English history. A new king was crowned; audiences swarmed to Covent Garden to see the Ballet Russes and Nijinskys gravity-defying leaps. The aristocracy was at play, bounding from house party to the next; the socialite Lady Michelham travelled with her nineteen yards of pearls. Rupert Brooke (a 23-year-old poet in love with love, Keats, marrons glaces and truth) swam in the river at Grantchester. But perfection was over-reaching itself. The rumble of thunder from the summer's storms presaged not only the bloody war years ahead: the country was brought to near standstill by industrial strikes, and unrest exposed the chasm between privileged and poor; as if the heat was torturing those imprisoned in society's straitjacket and stifled by the city smog. Children, seeking relief from the scorching sun, drowned in village ponds. What the protagonists could not have known is that they were playing out the backdrop to WWI; in a few years time the world, let alone England, would never be the same again. Through the eyes of a series of exceptional individuals; a debutante, a suffragette, a politician, a trade unionist, a butler and the Queen; Juliet Nicolson illuminates a turning point in history. With the gifts of a great storyteller she rekindles a vision of a time when the sun shone but its shadows fell on all. 'Juliet Nicolson has taken this 'perfect summer' as the backdrop for an ambitious work of multiple biography, which sets the extravagance of the upper classes against the increasingly desperate lives of the poor' Observer 'Evoke[s] the full vivid richness of how it smelt, looked, sounded, tasted and felt to be alive in England during the months of such a summer' Lady
