# Amateurs In Eden

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/joanna-hines/amateurs-in-eden/9780748131099

![Amateurs In Eden](https://quivercdn.com/covers/virago/joanna-hodgkin/amateurs-in-eden_978-07-4813-109-9.jpg?v=2026-04-29%2013%3A45%3A50)

- Book: [Amateurs In Eden](https://www.bookquiver.com/joanna-hines/amateurs-in-eden) ([Amateurs In Eden.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/joanna-hines/amateurs-in-eden.md))
- Authors: [Joanna Hines](https://www.bookquiver.com/joanna-hines)
- Publisher: virago
- Medium: ebook
- ISBN: 978-07-4813-109-9
- Published: 2012-02-09
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: E-book

## Description

Nancy Durrell was a woman famous for her silences. Anaïs Nin said 'I think often of Nancy's most eloquent silences, Nancy talking with her fingers, her hair, her cheeks, a wonderful gift. Music again.' As the first wife Lawrence Durrell, author of The Alexandria Quartet, it is perhaps surprising that she is an unknown entity, a constant presence in the biographies of Durrell and others in the Bloomsbury set, yet always a shadowy figure, beautiful and enigmatic. But who was the woman who was with Durrell during the most important years of his development as a writer? Joanna Hodgkin decides to retrace her mother's fascinating story: the escape from her toxic and mysterious family; the years in bohemian literary London and Paris in the 1930s; marriage to Durrell and their discovery of the 'Eden' of pre-war Corfu and her desperate struggle to survive in Palestine alone with a small child as the British Mandate collapsed. Amateurs in Eden is a fascinating biography of a literary marriage and of an unusual woman struggling to live an independent life.