Images And Shadows: Part Of A Life (New York Review Books Classics)

Images And Shadows: Part Of A Life (New York Review Books Classics)

An extraordinary memoir by Iris Origo, who chronicled political life in A Chill in the Air and War in Val d'Orcia, and now turns inward to describe her own family, the work of writing, and the transcience of memory.Images and Shadows, Iris Origo?s autobiographical account of her early life, is as perceptive and humane and beautifully written as her celebrated memoirWar in Val d?Orcia. Origo?s father came from an old and moneyed American family, her mother was the daughter of an Irish peer, and Iris grew up in the most privileged of circumstances. Her father died of tuberculosis when he was only thirty, and her mother moved to Fiesole, Italy, where she and Iris developed a close friendship with the great connoisseur and art historian Bernard Berenson. Later, Origo and her Italian husband transformed a desolate and deforested Tuscan property into a flourishing estate, and it was there that she discovered her true calling as a writer. InImages and Shadows, Origo paints portraits of her shy, loving father and her headstrong mother, and describes beloved places, the books that formed her sensibility, and how she grew up and made her way in the world. She reflects on the pleasures and challenges of writing and evokes the persistence and fragility of memory.Images and Shadows is an autobiography that is as thoughtful as it is profoundly touching.Review?An elegiac autobiography . . . illuminating.? -The Daily Telegraph?Images and Shadows, written with all the lucidity and lightness of touch for which she was widely admired, is extremely enjoyable. It is an engrossing picture of an earlier age, clever, full of acute literary asides, and with a kind of philosophizing that seems to belong to a time when writers did not have to make excuses when they reflected on the principles of morality and religion that governed their lives.? -Caroline Moorehead,The Spectator?[Origo?s] autobiography is distinguished by its beautiful prose style, its moral and psychological intelligence, and its vivid social history. . . . Among her distinctions is the fact that her personal writings are the works of a biographer and historian by temperament, training and practice. This . . . is of course what makes her personal writing so penetrating and valuable. But Iris combines this habit of mind with the techniques and ironic distance of a novelist of manners, which is what makes her observations so thoroughly readable.?- Beth Gutcheon,