Images and Shadows by Iris Origo

Images and Shadows by Iris Origo

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 memoir War 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. In Images 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.

Iris Origo (1902-1988) was a British-born biographer and writer. She lived in Italy and devoted much of her life to the improvement of the Tuscan estate at La Foce, which she purchased with her husband in the 1920s. During the Second World War, she sheltered refugee children and assisted many escaped Allied prisoners of war and partisans in defiance of Italy's fascist regime and Nazi occupation forces. She is the author of Images and Shadows; A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939-1940; Leopardi: A Study in Solitude; and The Merchant of Prato, among others.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett is a prizewinning historian and novelist. Her nonfiction book The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio was the winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, and the Costa Biography Award. She lives in London and Suffolk.

Katia Lysy was born in Rome. She has worked for Italian television RAI 3, in publishing, as a journalist and as a literary translator from English and French into Italian. She now lives between Rome and Val d'Orcia, in southern Tuscany, where she assists her mother Benedetta, daughter of the writer Iris Origo, in the management and development of the family estate of La Foce, whose historic gardens are visited by Iris Origo readers from all over the world.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781567921038
ISBN 10	1567921035
Title	Images and Shadows
Author	Iris Origo
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	David R. Godine Publisher Inc
Year published	2015-06-30
Number of pages	588
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable