Looking Back: A Panoramic View of a Literary Age by the Grandes Dames of European Letters - Hardcover

This is the first novel from the granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway. She currently lives in the Florida Keys. Her memoir, Walk on Water, is available from Simon and Schuster (10,000), who originally published Walking Into the River (500,000). Simon and Schuster will also publish her nonfiction book about tornadoes. She is set to begin a new novel.

This is a lively, entertaining collection of interviews with ten women, including Lesley Blanch, Joan Haslip, Molly Keane, Rosamond Lehmann, and P.L. Travers, who were born at the turn of the century and figured prominently in British literary circles. The interviews, conducted in the late 1980s by the London editor of The Paris Review , explore central themes in these women's lives, touching upon education and personal life, literary inspiration and friendships, and the writer's work and craft. The use of a common sequence of questions leads to abruptness in some individual interchanges. Still, this common pattern unites the collection, allowing the interviews individually to capture the spirit of each woman's personality and life and collectively to capture the spirit of an age. Recommended for collections in social and intellectual history, women's studies, and literature as well as for general readers. Some, but not all, of these interviews will appear in forthcoming issues of The Paris Review. --Ed.
- Ellen Finnie Duranceau, MIT Lib., Cambridge
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