Four French Holidays

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

Anne Hall

• Publisher: Unicorn
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9781911397540
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Four popular novelists of the same generation each wrote a novel inspired by a holiday that the author spent in France. In the nineteen-fifties, 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.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• AUGUST 1923
• JULY 1936
• OCTOBER 1955
• JUNE 1966
• Afterword: Novels of 1969
• Summary
• Notes and Further Reading
• Acknowledgements
• Picture Credits
• Copyright