found theatre ticket from April 2010 - must have gone with Mary Lou and Michael but no idea where I purchased the book - unless it was Powells ( )

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Wonderlijk levensverhaal van Pepita Duran, geschreven door haar kleindochter Vita Sackville-West. Allicht moet je door de eindeloze gangen van Knole gedwaald hebben, waar het zware tapijt van de geschiedenis over het huis gedrapeerd ligt, om dit verhaal te geloven. Een Spaanse vagebond die niet goed genoeg danst om in Madrid op te treden, maakt toch furore in de rest van Europa en verovert het hart van een Britse aristocraat. Na haar dood gaan Engelse advocaten in Zuid-Spanje op zoek naar wasvrouwen en dorpskruideniers om munitie te verzamelen voor een rechtszaak over de erfenis. Daar haalt Vita haar stof voor deze enigszins vooringenomen biografie, die op haar best is op de momenten dat de schrijfster loskomt van haar onderwerp.

Het tweede deel is gewijd aan Victoria, een van de dochters van Pepita en moeder van Vita. Eerder dan een biografie is het een poging van een dochter om in het reine te komen met haar bijzonder flamboyante - en dominante - moeder. Een emotionele queeste.

Deze editie met een voorwoord van de kleindochter van de kleindochter. ( )

Die Tänzerin und die Lady

Back in the less adventuresome years of my reading life, I think I read The Edwardians because I knew its author was a Lesbian and Virginia Woolf's One True Love. I retain no particle of memory for that book, so it may very well be that I *bought* the book in order to epater la bourgeoise aka my mother, and simply failed to read it.

I'll see about remedying that lapse some other time. Now, all I can say is, what a treat it is for me, at this juncture of my life, to meet Vita Sackville-West and her rackety great-grandmother, her louche grandmother, and her wildly eccentric mother. These women...! My dears, these are the Titanesses that make our own rather drab little lives recede into proper grayish flannely perspective.

(Vita warn't no slouch, either.)

There is a certain grandeur to the stories of the Pepitas' lives, a very odd kind of magnificence in these women's inability to be anyone other than themselves fully and entirely, no matter the cost. And costs there were, even unto the third generation: Lawsuits appear to have trailed glorious wings behind all the women up to Vita, whose Englishness seems to have squelched that side of things. (Didn't squelch her insistence on being herself, though, thank goodness!)

I love this sort of story. I hope that, one day, Anderson Cooper will take up his father Wyatt's mantle and tell us what Gloria Vanderbilt was like as a mama...his would be the only story I can imagine, barring a breach in the Kennedy walls, that would equal Pepita for glamour and sheer, inescapable romance. These personalities become rarer as the world that gives rise to them becomes more pedestrian and hugely boring in its upper reaches.

I feel compelled to say a word about another world now, seemingly, passed forever as well: The world of making lovely books for mass consumption. This book has a dustjacket that was, for its day, a luxe presentation, being four-color and quite charmingly designed; its paper is at least twice as thick as modern book papers, so that I found myself trying to peel the pages apart; its lovely cloth binding has a blind block of the author's initials surmounted by a coronet, and a spine attractively gold-blocked in a printed black ground; it is, in short, a lovely object.

The good people at Chin Music Press are doing what they can to prevent beautiful books from vanishing entirely; they are not, however, publishing books that will appeal to a mass audience more often than not. Pepita was intended to sell many copies, and so far as I am aware, did. How I wish that was still a realistic possibility!

Should you read this book? Well...maybe, maybe not. I think anyone with an ounce of romance in their soul should read it. But then, as it's not a novel, it doesn't have An Ending, really, so most romantics might find that a little off-putting. But really, since the book's hard to find, I'd say let it come to you serendipitously, the way my copy came to me from a library sale. It will find you ready and it will reward you for your patience, as it did me. ( )