Nadia May

This semi-autobiographical book is about the life of a young English woman who marries an ageing German aristocrat and in the marriage she focuses on her garden and children, at the same time running a country house. She also writes down her observations of the stuffy German aristocratic set using her razor sharp wit. Von Arnim was a successful author in her time and deserves to be re-discovered, this novel is a gem. In the first year of publication...

Here, Barbara Tuchman masterfully reveals the two contradictory images of the age, examining the great rhythms of history and the grain and texture of domestic life as it was lived: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes and war dominated the lives of serf, noble and clergy alike.