Girlitude: A Portrait of the 50s and 60s - Hardcover

Tennant, Emma

2.33

18 ratings by Goodreads

9780224059527: Girlitude: A Portrait of the 50s and 60s

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224059521 ISBN 13: 9780224059527

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1999

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Jonathan Cape Edition.

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Review:

In Strangers, her first foray into biography, Emma Tennant chronicled the lives of her eccentric, aristocratic forebears and their Scottish Gothic castle, Glen, in a languid, romantic memoir. Her next instalment, the delightfully entitled Girlitude: A Portrait of the 50s and 60s, concentrates on Tennant's own "long adolescence" from 18 to 30, her three marriages, her lovers, her experiences as a magazine journalist and first-time novelist, all set against the back-drop of the post-war boom of the 1950s and the free love and revolution of the 1960s.

Tennant writes in glittering, witty prose of her life at this time: one of the last debutantes to be presented at court, she became a young woman lurching from one marriage to the next, with a small child to support, a fledgling writing career and a host of connections on the London literary scene. She remained dependent on her parents until her late 20s and never felt she had grown up until her daughter was born in 1969. "If I have given birth to a woman, I ponder afterwards, can I at last give up being a girl?" Wry and poignant by turns, Girlitude is a sparkling portrait of the writer's golden years, and a vivid account of her changing times. --Catherine Taylor

Review:

"What makes these memoirs so engaging, apart from the precision of the prose, is the self-mocking detachment with which Tennant depicts her own adolescent discomforts--She laughs at her mistakes with an infectious gaiety." - "The Times "Beautifully written." - "Mail on Sunday "From the Trade Paperback edition.

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