Diana Athill
Author
Publisher
New York Review Books
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"In England half a century ago, well-brought-up young women are meant to aspire to the respectable life. Some things are not to be spoken of; some are most certainly not to be done. There are rules, conventions. Meg Bailey obeys them. She progresses from Home Counties school to un-Bohemian art college with few outward signs of passion or frustration. Her personality is submerged in polite routines; even with her best friend, Roxane, what can't be...
Author
Language
English
Description
Now in her ninety-first year and freed from any of the inhibitions that even she may once have had, Diana Athill reflects candidly, and sometimes with great humor, on the condition of being old. Known for the honesty and elegantly expressed wisdom of her memoirs, Athill presents a lively narrative of the people and experiences that have taught her to regret very little, to resist despondency, and to question the beliefs and customs of her generation....
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Diana Athill's childhood was idyllic, brought up in the Norfolk countryside. Aged only fifteen, she fell in love with a young undergraduate. They travelled to Oxford, engaged to be married. Then everything fell apart in the cruellest possible way. In this classic modern memoir, Diana Athill dissects the terrible consequences of loss and her struggle to rebuild a personality destroyed by sadness. Yet for all its unhappiness, Instead of a Letter remains...
Author
Publisher
W. W. Norton & Company
Pub. Date
2016.
Language
English
Description
"A luminous, wise, and joyful insight into what really matters at the end of a long life, from the beloved author of the award-winning Somewhere Towards the End. What will you remember if you live to be 100? Diana Athill charmed readers with her prize-winning memoir Somewhere Towards the End, which transformed her into an unexpected literary star. Now, on the eve of her ninety-eighth birthday, Athill has written a sequel every bit as unsentimental,...
Author
Publisher
W. W. Norton & Co
Pub. Date
2010
Language
English
Description
"When Diana Athill met the man she calls Didi, she fell in love instantly and out of love just as fast. Didi’s quirks, which at first appeared so charming and sweet, soon revealed a darker side—he was a gambler, a drinker, and a womanizer, impossible to live with but impossible to ignore. After a Funeral explores the years of their friendship; a period that culminated in Didi’s suicide (in Athill’s apartment)."--Publisher description.
Author
Language
English
Description
"I can remember in detail being hit by my first story one January morning in 1958." So begins literary legend Diana Athill in the preface to Midsummer Night in the Workhouse, a long-overdue collection of her short fiction, stories which were originally published in the 1950s to the 1970s. In unsentimental though often touching prose, Athill's young women anticipate, enjoy, or just miss out on brief sexual encounters with men met on trains, at parties...
Author
Language
English
Description
For nearly five decades Diana Athill edited (nursed, coerced, coaxed) some of the most celebrated writers in the English language, among them V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Mordecai Richler, and Norman Mailer. A founding editor of the prestigious publishing house André Deutsch Ltd., Athill takes us on a guided tour through the corridors of literary London, offering a keenly observed, devilishly funny, and always compassionate insider's portrait of the...
10) Alive, Alive Oh!
Author
Language
English
Description
Several years ago, Diana Athill accepted that she could no longer live entirely independently, and moved to a retirement home in Highgate. Released from the daily anxieties of caring for her own property and free to settle into her remaining years, she reflects on what it feels like to be very old, and on the moments in her long life that have risen to the surface and which sustain her in these last years.
What really matters in the end? Which memories...