![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Lucy Boston
Oct. 2nd, 2007 10:26 am"Every year that I live here it is as though another of my personalities is left behind leaving me nearer the first and the last plain theme. It is not only that as one grows older the passions and vanities fade, nor that the pressure of the present day obliges one to live an ever simpler live, to make and to do with one's own hands whatever is necessary, to be for ever saying goodbye to civilization. It is rather that civilization has turned to shoddy, plastic and sham, has become a cage with bars of cliche, so that one must get out. Here on my island the years have opened like a rose in the sun, the fury of standardization has missed one little byway, and events have remained in their real dimension as reactions of the human heart, limitless, yet dependent on fleeting pulse."
Lucy Boston, Yew Hall
I've read the Green Knowe books for many years - since I was in my teens and 20s though, not as a child - but a few years ago![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lisajulie presented me with an autobiography by Lucy Boston called Memory in a House. I read it little bits at a time, slowly and with great pleasure, and then started looking for more of Boston's work that told about herself. I don't know if the book would have captured me initially if I hadn't already had the images in my mind of the house from Green Knowe rising like an ancient stone ship above the floodwaters of the Fens, but in my desire to hear Boston talk more about the house that was the reality behind the model in Green Knowe I fell head-first into her life and philosophy. Now one by one I'm tracking down the half-dozen of Boston's non-juvenile books from used book dealer's and interlibrary loan. Fiction or non-fiction, they all feature herself and her house and her thoughts.
In some way Boston's writing is the country mouse to Carolyn Heilbrun's city mouse in The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty and Writing a Woman's Life. But where Heilbrun's perceptions are flavored with anger and feminist intellectualism, Boston's revolve around the placid solidity of time, history, and gardens. Both cause me to identify with their writing, and to think deeply - Boston's give more pleasure.
Maybe it's a control issue. Always in charge, Heilbrun took her own life when she felt that she was done. Boston waited calmly into her nineties for death to gather her in - growing less and less able to "do" but still and always listening and feeling.
Lucy Boston, Yew Hall
I've read the Green Knowe books for many years - since I was in my teens and 20s though, not as a child - but a few years ago
lisajulie presented me with an autobiography by Lucy Boston called Memory in a House. I read it little bits at a time, slowly and with great pleasure, and then started looking for more of Boston's work that told about herself. I don't know if the book would have captured me initially if I hadn't already had the images in my mind of the house from Green Knowe rising like an ancient stone ship above the floodwaters of the Fens, but in my desire to hear Boston talk more about the house that was the reality behind the model in Green Knowe I fell head-first into her life and philosophy. Now one by one I'm tracking down the half-dozen of Boston's non-juvenile books from used book dealer's and interlibrary loan. Fiction or non-fiction, they all feature herself and her house and her thoughts.In some way Boston's writing is the country mouse to Carolyn Heilbrun's city mouse in The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty and Writing a Woman's Life. But where Heilbrun's perceptions are flavored with anger and feminist intellectualism, Boston's revolve around the placid solidity of time, history, and gardens. Both cause me to identify with their writing, and to think deeply - Boston's give more pleasure.
Maybe it's a control issue. Always in charge, Heilbrun took her own life when she felt that she was done. Boston waited calmly into her nineties for death to gather her in - growing less and less able to "do" but still and always listening and feeling.
