eBay

MORNING GLORY MARY MOTLEY LONGMANS: LONDON 1961 1st edition. 22 x 14 cm. ix + 315 pp + b/w photo plates. HB/DJ In this outstanding piece of autobiography, Mary Motley tells of the first two decades of her life, prior to the episode in French Equatorial Africa which she described so brilliantly in her highly praised first book, Devils in Waiting. Daughter of the sculptress and writer Clare Sheridan, cousin of Sir Winston Churchill, goddaughter of the late Crown Princess of Sweden, she has many entertaining memories of childhood encounters—nursery tea with the Duke of Con-naught, a visit to the Empress Eugenie, magical games with Kipling, Cousin Winston's remark 'At your age I wanted to run away and worship idols'. After early years at her grandparents' country homes she lived in London and New York; then Mama, whirling restlessly from place to place, swept her and her brother to a villa on the Baltic, to Constantinople (where a French General organised the household), and finally to Algeria, where a house was built near Biskra. Apart from occasional visitors like the Duff Coopers and Lady Mountbatten, they shunned Europeans and gradually became accepted as intimates by their Arab neighbours. It was then that, with a sense of mystic exaltation, the author felt the magnetic pull of the desert and embarked on three Sahara trips perhaps unique in the experience of an English girl barely twenty. In the Sahara she found 'perfection for ever'. But there were interludes in Europe—with Axel Munthe, strange author of the world best-seller The Story of San Michele; with Sir Ernest Wallis Budge, greatest Egyptologist of his day; with the American financier Bernard Baruch; with her aunt, Lady Wavertree, at Cannes. She reveals too how the priceless original manuscripts of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's plays were lost to posterity in a mad escapade of her brother's. Crisp, amusing, and elegant in style, the book is illustrated with some unusually interesting photographs.