The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm

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Topping the best-seller charts in Britain, The Perfect Summer chronicles a glorious English summer a century ago when the world was on the cusp of irrevocable change. In the summer of 1911 a new king was crowned and the aristocracy was at play, bounding from one house party to the next. At a London debutante charity ball where the other girls came dressed as virginal white swans, the striking debutante Lady Diana Manners made a late appearance as a black swan. The Ballets Russes arrived in London for the first time and people swarmed to Covent Garden to see Nijinsky's gravity-defying leaps. Through the tight lens of four months, Juliet Nicolson's rich storytelling gifts evoke for us the sights, colors, and feelings of a bygone era. But perfection was not for all. Cracks in the social fabric were showing and the country was brought to a standstill by industrial strikes. Led by the charismatic Ben Tillett, the Southampton Dockers' Union paralyzed shipping in the country's ports. Unionist Mary Macarthur inspired women from the "sweated industries" to take to the streets in protest of intolerable conditions. Home Secretary Winston Churchill, fearing that the country was on the verge of collapse, gave in to demands for wage increases. Temperatures rose steadily to more than one hundred degrees; by August deaths from heatstroke were too many for newspapers to report. Drawing on material from intimate and rarely seen sources and narrated through the eyes of a series of exceptional individuals--among them a debutante, a choirboy, a politician, a trade unionist, a butler, and the queen--The Perfect Summer is a vividly rendered glimpse of the twilight of the Edwardian era.

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Publisher’s Weekly (02/12/2007)
The granddaughter of Bloomsbury notables Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson chronicles the minutiae of the hot, sunny summer of 1911, when the rich crammed in a succession of parties as industrial strikes almost brought the country to a standstill, and WWI loomed on the horizon. Under Nicolson's lavish attentions, "upstairs" and "downstairs," the weighty and frivolous spring to vivid life. While Mary approached her upcoming coronation as queen with dread, Leonard Woolf fell in love with his Cambridge pal's sister, the budding novelist Virginia Stephen. The bewitching marchioness of Ripon arranged for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes to perform at Covent Garden, and theTimes revealed that certain servants were selling juicy tidbits about their aristocratic employers to American newspapers. Trade unionist Mary Macarthur's fight for women's rights meshes artfully with racy novelist Elinor Glyn's adulterous affair with ambivalent lover Lord Curzon. Lady Diana Manners's tart observations of her debutante season segue to a rendezvous between a footman and a kitchen maid. Drawing on a wide variety of primary sources-from Churchill's memoirs to the tell-allWhat the Butler Winked At -journalist Nicolson's debut, a British bestseller, serves up a delightfully gossipy yet substantial slice of social history. Photos not seen byPW .(June)

Library Journal (04/01/2007)
The granddaughter of writer Vita Sackville-West, Nicolson offers an engaging story covering just four summer months in 1911. English society was living large; there seemed no end to its extravagances. Meanwhile-and as always-the lower classes struggled, and the war loomed. Nicolson concentrates on specific persons representing different social strata and adds a great deal of humor to describe some of the period's eccentricities. Among the figures she includes are Winston Churchill (then home secretary), the scandalous Lady Diana Manners, and Queen Mary. Nicolson had access to many primary sources, some never before seen by the public. In a satisfying epilog, she tracks the fates of the personalities on whom she focuses. A best seller in Britain (and deservedly so), this quick, enjoyable read shows the inevitability of the decline of the aristocracy by blending serious history, quirky details, and an all-encompassing portrait of English society. Recommended. [See Prepub Alert,LJ 1/07.]-B. Allison Gray, John Jermain Memorial Lib., Sag Harbor, NY

ISBN: 0802118461 | EAN: 9780802118462
Publisher: Grove Press  | Publication Date: May, 2007

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