The Durrells
The Story of a Family
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- $28.99
Publisher Description
A variously tragic tale of escapism and assimilation, Richard Bradford's The Durrells explores the truth behind the image.
The Durrells are probably the most celebrated literary family of the 20th century. Gerald turned them into celebrities with his tripartite memoir, beginning with My Family and Other Animals (1956) which told of his experiences with his widowed mother Louisa and three siblings during their time in 1930s Corfu. We know of the Durrells from their own writings and from the image of them created by TV, film and biographical accounts of specific figures. What we do not know is the truth.
Using previously unpublished material from the Jersey Archive, Richard Bradford unravels the lives of the famous four children of the Corfu era – Larry, Gerry, Margo and Lesli – as they find themselves geographically and emotionally divided amongst a backdrop of imperial decline and unrest. The children of moneyed colonialists, they were already used to being treated with aghast fascination by the island's locals, and by expatriate Britons as a disgrace to the homeland.
Yet their story goes beyond the Ionian Sea, and The Durrells delves into the complex social and political circumstances in which the family lived, with seemingly constant threats of war and endangerment to both themselves and their natural environment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ulster University English professor Bradford (The Man Who Wasn't There) uncovers the truth behind the Durrells, an eccentric British expat family, in this revealing biography. After the death of her husband, Louisa Durrell and her four children decamped to the Greek island of Corfu in 1935. Her youngest son, Gerald, mythologized their time there in a series of memoirs, beginning with My Family and Other Animals in 1956, that turned the family into celebrities and inspired TV shows and films. Bradford reveals how Gerald, a zoologist who resented writing and leaned on it to support his real passion of working with animals, strayed far from the facts in his portrayal of the family. He left out, for example, "that most of the indigenous population treated them with aghast fascination, and expatriate Britons saw them as a disgrace to the homeland." Bradford also notes that Louisa was a severe alcoholic and that Gerald's brother Lawrence, a writer of experimental novels, was a serial domestic abuser. Among other insights into the family's dynamics, Bradford notes that the brothers "matched one another in terms of global fame but who were utterly antithetical in what they represented and wrote." Fans of the Durrells will be intrigued and aghast by this demystifying tell-all.
