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The Sunlight on the Garden: A Memoir of Love, War and Madness

In 1880, housemaid Ada Curtis bore the first of several illegitimate children from her employer, the son of a once-grand family obsessed with its own threadbare nobility. More than a century later, Elizabeth Speller — Ada's great-granddaughter — became inspired by the stories, reinventions, and half-truths in her family's past to set her own record straight. This passionate and intriguing memoir brings to life the hopes and failures of four generations of a family filled with tales of wealth inherited and lost, sexual indiscretion, and closely guarded secrets. A recurrence of madness is also uncovered — Ada Curtis went mad not long after conceiving her children, and Elizabeth herself experienced a mental breakdown — exposing a troubling thread that links together decades of an intimate but troubled family.

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 256
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781862079250
  • Genres
  • memoir
  • Release date
  • 2007