Walled Gardens: Scenes from an Anglo-Irish Childhood

by Annabel Goff (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2008

  $13.33

  Walled Gardens is a brilliant portrait of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, struggling through the post-war depression aided by drink, horse-racing and religion, and their own idiosyncratic adaptations to modern life. Seen from the troubled perspective of the daughter of an aristocratic family in decline, we watch the disintegration of a marriage in elegant but emotionally chilled surroundings, and the struggle to keep up appearances, and a collapsing roof, in front of the neighbours. By turns sad, absured and funny, the story is ultimately liberating as failure leads to freedom.

• Used

  Paperback
  1994

  $3.42

  This is a journey both into a time and a place - the South of Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. The author describes a childhood outside the main currents of the twentieth century; her parents still went fox hunting and horse racing and relied on readily available servants from a vast and inexpensive work-pool. At the same time they had no central heating, no television, and the roof leaked. Like many other Anglo-Irish families they attempted outlandish and impractical schemes to maintain deteriorating driveways and crumbling houses. This is an affectionate yet unsentimental memoir of a transitional generation, one born too late to benefit from the last years of the Ascendancy, but too early to integrate into the mainstream of contemporary Irish life.