Four French Holidays: Daphne Du Maurier, Stella Gibbons, Rumer Godden, Margery Sharp and Their Novels Inspired by France

By Anne Hall

Four popular novelists of the same generation each wrote a novel inspired by a holiday that the author spent in France. In the nineteen-fift ies, Rumer Godden basedThe Greengage Summeron her recollections of her family's 1923 battlefield- tour manqu? in the Champagne region. Margery Sharp's 1936 holiday in Southern France led toStill WatersandThe Nutmeg Tree: both the short story and the novel are set in and around the region of Aix-les-Bains. In 1955, Daphne du Maurier first visited the department of Sarthe to research French family history; the novelThe Scapegoatwas the immediate result of the holiday. And in 1966, Stella Gibbons' last trip to the continent took the form of a visit to an old friend in her summer home near Grenoble. The stay is obliquely refl ected in The Snow-Woman, in which a similar holiday leads a never-married septuagenarian to experience a renaissance of sorts.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1911397273
• ISBN13: 9781911397274
• Release Date: June 2023
• Publisher: Unicorn Publishing Group
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.3"