Lucy M. Boston
Encyclopedia
Lucy M. Boston was an English children's writer. She is best known for the six books in the Green Knowe
series (1954-1976).
in Lancashire
in 1892 and died in 1990. During her long life-time, she distinguished herself as a writer, mainly of children’s books and as the creator of a magical garden; she was also an accomplished artist, who had studied drawing and painting in Vienna
and it is surely this artistic gift which, added to her ability as an accomplished needlewoman, enabled her to a make a series of outstandingly beautiful and artistic patchwork
s.As an author, she was a late starter as her first book didn't appear until she was over sixty.
Lucy was the fifth of six children. She had two older brothers, two older sisters and a younger brother. In her memoir, Perverse and Foolish, dealing with her early life and family, she describes life in a typically solid and affluent middle class Victorian
family. The family were committed Wesleyans
. Her father, James Wood, was an engineer and businessman who for some years was Mayor of Southport. Lucy describes her father as ‘an eccentric with big ideas, a small, good-humoured, dynamic man’,(1) to whom it was said that Lucy bore a striking resemblance. She was also said by the family to be his favourite and she clearly loved and admired him very much.
Lucy’s father was already forty when he married her mother, who was half his age, the daughter of a Wesleyan minister. A photograph of the parents, probably taken at the time of their marriage, shows Mary standing dutifully beside her husband looking, perhaps, a little doubtful, even resigned; James, seated, is holding a prayer book
and looking more confidently, if slightly quizzically, towards the camera. It was not, Lucy tells us, a love-match but one made under pressure
from her mother’s family since they had seven daughters. Her mother is described as ‘delicate, intensely sensitive, and without a trace of sensuous feeling.’ She goes on to say: ‘She bore, as Victorian wives had to, a child every year, but had little maternal feeling.’ Lucy adds: ‘She should have been a nun
. She was very gentle.’ Her mother’s religious beliefs were rigid and she held that every word of scripture was literally true.
Although it must have gone against the grain of her rather retiring character, her mother had to perform duties as Mayoress for many years, at which Lucy says she must have been very bad. In particular, entertaining must have been a strain for her as ‘her idea of food was that it was a sad necessity. [After her husband’s death] she even began to think it was not even necessary and the boys raged with hunger.’
As evidence of her father’s eccentricity – and religious fervour – Lucy describes the interior of the house he bought and had decorated in preparation for his marriage and the family he intended to raise there. In every room, painted frieze
s carried religious mottos, such as ‘He that giveth to the poor shall not lack’, ‘Honour they father and thy mother’ and ‘The soul is not where it lives but where it loves. (2)
But what she describes as ‘the triumph of eccentricity’ was the drawing room
. Her father had recently visited the Holy Land
and had brought back many things with the idea of creating what she describes as ‘a holy and uplifting room’. There was a continuous frieze of a painted landscape representing the journey from Jerusalem to Jericho
, while from the ceiling hung antique brass lamp-holders such as might have hung in Solomon’s Temple. Recesses in the walls were divided by wooden arcades of the Moorish
onion shape and there were many beautiful objects made of brass, as well as other rarities displayed in a glass-fronted cupboard. Lucy says: ‘This unexpected room did not look at all like a Kardomah Café as you might think. It looked like a gentleman’s enthusiastic and satisfied near-lunacy.’
Her father was clearly a passionate man with an appreciation of the aesthetic side of life, albeit channelled largely through his religious convictions, whereas her mother was devout, and abstemious. The passionate side of her father’s nature seems to be echoed in Lucy’s own passion for music, art and nature, while much of her development as a teenager and young woman seems to have been partly driven by a need to cast off her mother’s repressive influence.
Lucy’s father died when she was six. This marked a huge change in the family fortunes. For one thing, as was the custom, her mother had been left only enough money to keep the house together, while each child was left a small fortune to be spent on their education
. (One surmises that it was these ‘private means’ which later enabled Lucy to break free from family ties and to live independently.) Her mother, now in reduced circumstances and with no experience of handling finances, was saved, Lucy says, ‘by having no interest in anything money could buy, a natural and extreme frugality and austerity.’ She adds that, as positive attributes, her mother also had ‘no vulgarity, no inquisitiveness and no possessiveness.’ Despite the ‘reduced circumstances’ her mother always gave ten percent of her income to charity
.
A major change in the circumstance of the Wood children was that now they all went to school. One important factors which comes into the picture around this time and may also provide some clues to Lucy’s later development, was a move to Westmorland
where they spent a year near to her mother’s family home at Arnside
. This was said to be for the benefit of her mother’s health. Whatever the reason, this move to glorious countryside, then unspoilt by tourism or any hint of modernisation, gave all the children a much more free and easy life-style than had been possible in Southport. Lucy describes ecstatically the ‘wide and inexhaustible joys of Arnside’, which is on an estuary of the river Kent
. The children were free to wander woods and fields, explore the cliffs and coves of the river. In Lucy’s case, the return of Spring, with primroses and fields of wild daffodils, was especially thrilling since in Southport the only signs of Spring were the red and white hawthorns along the streets and her mother never had a single flower in the house. Lucy clearly developed an awareness of plants and gardens at an early age and mentions several times how dull and barren she found the gardens of her childhood. This is significant in the context of her later development as a gardener and the outstanding garden which she created at The Manor.
The return to Southport, after the idyllic year in Westmorland, was hard for Lucy. Every night she wept bitter tears and grieved for all she was now parted from: worn rocks and turf under her feet instead of pavements, ‘the night sounds of the river birds, flocks of sandpipers in flight, curlew
s and solitary gull
s.’ (3)
When she left school Lucy went to a finishing school
in Paris
and perhaps the most important event in this ‘gap’ year was that the time came for her to be formally received into the Wesleyan community. To her mother’s horror, she refused. Her mother wept and implored, told her she was ‘lost’, but Lucy remained adamant. ‘Yet as I stepped out of the fold into the unknown I repeated privately to myself, ‘He shall keep my soul until that day’. I knew I was in search, not in denial. The abandonment of one’s father’s faith is a deep fear and sorrow and I felt an outsider.’ She went up to Somerville College, Oxford
, to read English in Autumn 1914, in the first months of the First World War. During her second term she grew increasingly restless – she wanted to be sharing the experience of her generation. She decided to leave college and go to war as a volunteer nurse. Her ambition was to get to France
, where, as she put it, ‘it was all going on.’ In her memoir, Perverse and Foolish, she gives a full count of her war-time experiences in which she showed all the irreverence for red tape and conventional attitudes which were to become characteristic of her entire life. She was posted to a casualty clearing station
in France where she befriended wounded soldiers and tried to humanise the stark hospital experience by, for example, playing draughts
with them. This activity nearly got her dismissed by the starchy American nurse in charge of the ward, who was outraged to see Lucy sitting on a bed! ‘Nurse, get off that bed at once! Don’t you know it’s unprofessional to sit on a patient’s bed?’
During this time, Lucy’s relationship with her brothers and with her mother’s cousin Harold Boston was close. They, of course, were all serving in the armed forces but any leaves or spare time they had were spent together. Philip, her youngest brother, was reported missing in 1917 when his plane was shot down. Later that same year, Lucy and Harold were married, but following the failure of the marriage in 1935 she wandered in France, Italy
, Austria
and Hungary
, visiting the musical capitals of Europe. She also studied painting in Vienna and immersed herself in this for the next three or four years. (4)
Lucy’s memoir of her childhood and youth, Perverse and Foolish, published in 1979, ends with her return to England
in 1937, when she took rooms in Cambridge
where her son, Peter Boston, born in 1918 and now aged nineteen, was an undergraduate at the University. One day, hearing that a house was for sale in the near-by village of Hemingford Grey
, Lucy remembered that years before, in 1915, she had glimpsed from the river a seemingly derelict farmhouse. She jumped to the conclusion that this must be the house for sale, drove out to Hemingford Grey in a taxi, knocked at the door and announced the astonished owners that she would be interested in buying it. It turned out that they had only that morning decided to sell it and that the house advertised for sale was a completely different one. She never did find out which house she should have gone to see.
Another autobiographical memoir, entitled Memory in a House, describes her life thereafter, including the renovation and restoration of The Manor. The whole of that book, actually published before Perverse and Foolish and written when Lucy was eighty-one, can truly be described as an extended love letter to the house. In 1992 the two memoirs were published in chronological order in a single volume, entitled Memories.
The ancient Norman
Manor house
, built in about 1130, is reputed to be one of the oldest continually inhabited houses in the British Isles
. It became the focus and inspiration for her creativity for the rest of her life. Although work on the garden began as soon as necessary work on the house was finished, in respect of her writing Lucy was a late starter. Her first book, Yew Hall, a novel for adults, was published in 1954 when she was over sixty and she describes it as ‘a poem to celebrate my love of the house.’ There followed a series of children’s books, all set in The Manor, in which she brings to life the people who she imagines might have lived there.
Lucy Boston lived at The Manor for almost fifty years in which time she created the romantic garden which she felt was an appropriate setting for the ancient house, wrote all her children’s books and created over twenty patchwork masterpieces. Surprisingly, and rather frustratingly to anyone interested in the provenance and creation of the patchworks, the only mention of patchwork in Memory in a House comes when she describes repairing an old patchwork hanging in the dining-room, in which every piece of material was pre-1830. As a result, the patchworks were scarcely known about until, in 1976, when the celebrated conductor and keyboard player, Christopher Hogwood
, who was a close friend, arranged an exhibition of them at the King’s Lynn Festival. Fortunately for us, her daughter-in law, Diana Boston, has been able to tell the story of the patchworks, using a collection of letters which Lucy wrote to her niece, Caroline Hemming, another patchwork enthusiast, as well as catalogues and patchwork paraphernalia amongst her possessions.(5) This painstaking and beautifully presented labour of love was published as The Patchworks of Lucy Boston in 1995. A new edition is now available.
series:
The Green Knowe series was published by Faber and Faber
and also in Puffin Books
Other fictional works:
Lucy M. Boston also wrote a short story called "Curfew" which appeared in the anthology The House of the Nightmare: and other Eerie Tales, published in 1967.
In 2011, Boston's supernatural tales were collected in the volume Curfew & Other Eerie Tales (Dublin: Swan River Press). This volume includes unpublished tales as well as a reprint of the two act play The Horned Man.
Perverse and Foolish and Memory in a House were published together in 1992 under the title Memories, with an Introduction by Jill Paton Walsh
and linking passage and postscript by Peter Boston. Publisher: Colt Books Ltd. Cambridge.
A 2009 film, From Time To Time
, was written and directed by Julian Fellowes
, who also wrote Gosford Park
(2001). It is based on the second of the books in the Greene Knowe series.
http://www.quilt.co.uk/?p=76
In Lucy Boston A Bodley Head Monograph published in 1965, Jasper Rose discusses and anayses Lucy Boston as a children's writer.
A gallery of the real Green Knowe,The Manor at Hemingford Grey
A paper by David Lenander examining the themes in the book The River At Green Knowe, "Crosscurrents in The River at Green Knowe by L.M. Boston"
Synopses, cover art, and reviews at FantasyLiterature.net
Green Knowe
Green Knowe is a series of six books written by Lucy M. Boston, published between 1954 and 1976. They feature a very old house, Green Knowe, which is based on Boston's then-residence, The Manor in Hemingford Grey, Cambridgeshire. Some books in the series feature a boy called Toseland and his...
series (1954-1976).
Biography
Boston was born in SouthportSouthport
Southport is a seaside town in the Metropolitan Borough of Sefton in Merseyside, England. During the 2001 census Southport was recorded as having a population of 90,336, making it the eleventh most populous settlement in North West England...
in Lancashire
Lancashire
Lancashire is a non-metropolitan county of historic origin in the North West of England. It takes its name from the city of Lancaster, and is sometimes known as the County of Lancaster. Although Lancaster is still considered to be the county town, Lancashire County Council is based in Preston...
in 1892 and died in 1990. During her long life-time, she distinguished herself as a writer, mainly of children’s books and as the creator of a magical garden; she was also an accomplished artist, who had studied drawing and painting in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
and it is surely this artistic gift which, added to her ability as an accomplished needlewoman, enabled her to a make a series of outstandingly beautiful and artistic patchwork
Patchwork
Patchwork or "pieced work" is a form of needlework that involves sewing together pieces of fabric into a larger design. The larger design is usually based on repeat patterns built up with different colored shapes. These shapes are carefully measured and cut, straight-sided, basic geometric shapes...
s.As an author, she was a late starter as her first book didn't appear until she was over sixty.
Lucy was the fifth of six children. She had two older brothers, two older sisters and a younger brother. In her memoir, Perverse and Foolish, dealing with her early life and family, she describes life in a typically solid and affluent middle class Victorian
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
family. The family were committed Wesleyans
Wesleyanism
Wesleyanism or Wesleyan theology refers, respectively, to either the eponymous movement of Protestant Christians who have historically sought to follow the methods or theology of the eighteenth-century evangelical reformers, John Wesley and his brother Charles Wesley, or to the likewise eponymous...
. Her father, James Wood, was an engineer and businessman who for some years was Mayor of Southport. Lucy describes her father as ‘an eccentric with big ideas, a small, good-humoured, dynamic man’,(1) to whom it was said that Lucy bore a striking resemblance. She was also said by the family to be his favourite and she clearly loved and admired him very much.
Lucy’s father was already forty when he married her mother, who was half his age, the daughter of a Wesleyan minister. A photograph of the parents, probably taken at the time of their marriage, shows Mary standing dutifully beside her husband looking, perhaps, a little doubtful, even resigned; James, seated, is holding a prayer book
Prayer book
A 'prayer book' is a book outlining the 'liturgy' of religious services.In this sense, it may carry the following specific names in various religions:*Breviary or Missal, in Roman Catholicism*Agenda , in Lutheranism...
and looking more confidently, if slightly quizzically, towards the camera. It was not, Lucy tells us, a love-match but one made under pressure
Arranged marriage
An arranged marriage is a practice in which someone other than the couple getting married makes the selection of the persons to be wed, meanwhile curtailing or avoiding the process of courtship. Such marriages had deep roots in royal and aristocratic families around the world...
from her mother’s family since they had seven daughters. Her mother is described as ‘delicate, intensely sensitive, and without a trace of sensuous feeling.’ She goes on to say: ‘She bore, as Victorian wives had to, a child every year, but had little maternal feeling.’ Lucy adds: ‘She should have been a nun
Nun
A nun is a woman who has taken vows committing her to live a spiritual life. She may be an ascetic who voluntarily chooses to leave mainstream society and live her life in prayer and contemplation in a monastery or convent...
. She was very gentle.’ Her mother’s religious beliefs were rigid and she held that every word of scripture was literally true.
Although it must have gone against the grain of her rather retiring character, her mother had to perform duties as Mayoress for many years, at which Lucy says she must have been very bad. In particular, entertaining must have been a strain for her as ‘her idea of food was that it was a sad necessity. [After her husband’s death] she even began to think it was not even necessary and the boys raged with hunger.’
As evidence of her father’s eccentricity – and religious fervour – Lucy describes the interior of the house he bought and had decorated in preparation for his marriage and the family he intended to raise there. In every room, painted frieze
Frieze
thumb|267px|Frieze of the [[Tower of the Winds]], AthensIn architecture the frieze is the wide central section part of an entablature and may be plain in the Ionic or Doric order, or decorated with bas-reliefs. Even when neither columns nor pilasters are expressed, on an astylar wall it lies upon...
s carried religious mottos, such as ‘He that giveth to the poor shall not lack’, ‘Honour they father and thy mother’ and ‘The soul is not where it lives but where it loves. (2)
But what she describes as ‘the triumph of eccentricity’ was the drawing room
Drawing room
A drawing room is a room in a house where visitors may be entertained. The name is derived from the sixteenth-century terms "withdrawing room" and "withdrawing chamber", which remained in use through the seventeenth century, and made its first written appearance in 1642...
. Her father had recently visited the Holy Land
Holy Land
The Holy Land is a term which in Judaism refers to the Kingdom of Israel as defined in the Tanakh. For Jews, the Land's identifiction of being Holy is defined in Judaism by its differentiation from other lands by virtue of the practice of Judaism often possible only in the Land of Israel...
and had brought back many things with the idea of creating what she describes as ‘a holy and uplifting room’. There was a continuous frieze of a painted landscape representing the journey from Jerusalem to Jericho
Jericho
Jericho ; is a city located near the Jordan River in the West Bank of the Palestinian territories. It is the capital of the Jericho Governorate and has a population of more than 20,000. Situated well below sea level on an east-west route north of the Dead Sea, Jericho is the lowest permanently...
, while from the ceiling hung antique brass lamp-holders such as might have hung in Solomon’s Temple. Recesses in the walls were divided by wooden arcades of the Moorish
Moorish architecture
Moorish architecture is the western term used to describe the articulated Berber-Islamic architecture of North Africa and Al-Andalus.-Characteristic elements:...
onion shape and there were many beautiful objects made of brass, as well as other rarities displayed in a glass-fronted cupboard. Lucy says: ‘This unexpected room did not look at all like a Kardomah Café as you might think. It looked like a gentleman’s enthusiastic and satisfied near-lunacy.’
Her father was clearly a passionate man with an appreciation of the aesthetic side of life, albeit channelled largely through his religious convictions, whereas her mother was devout, and abstemious. The passionate side of her father’s nature seems to be echoed in Lucy’s own passion for music, art and nature, while much of her development as a teenager and young woman seems to have been partly driven by a need to cast off her mother’s repressive influence.
Lucy’s father died when she was six. This marked a huge change in the family fortunes. For one thing, as was the custom, her mother had been left only enough money to keep the house together, while each child was left a small fortune to be spent on their education
Education
Education in its broadest, general sense is the means through which the aims and habits of a group of people lives on from one generation to the next. Generally, it occurs through any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts...
. (One surmises that it was these ‘private means’ which later enabled Lucy to break free from family ties and to live independently.) Her mother, now in reduced circumstances and with no experience of handling finances, was saved, Lucy says, ‘by having no interest in anything money could buy, a natural and extreme frugality and austerity.’ She adds that, as positive attributes, her mother also had ‘no vulgarity, no inquisitiveness and no possessiveness.’ Despite the ‘reduced circumstances’ her mother always gave ten percent of her income to charity
Charity
-Concepts and practices:* Charity , the practice of benevolent giving and caring* Charity , the Christian theological concept of unlimited love and kindness* Principle of charity in philosophy and rhetoric...
.
A major change in the circumstance of the Wood children was that now they all went to school. One important factors which comes into the picture around this time and may also provide some clues to Lucy’s later development, was a move to Westmorland
Westmorland
Westmorland is an area of North West England and one of the 39 historic counties of England. It formed an administrative county from 1889 to 1974, after which the entirety of the county was absorbed into the new county of Cumbria.-Early history:...
where they spent a year near to her mother’s family home at Arnside
Arnside
Arnside is a village and civil parish in Cumbria, England. It faces the estuary of the River Kent on the north eastern corner of Morecambe Bay, within the Arnside and Silverdale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty...
. This was said to be for the benefit of her mother’s health. Whatever the reason, this move to glorious countryside, then unspoilt by tourism or any hint of modernisation, gave all the children a much more free and easy life-style than had been possible in Southport. Lucy describes ecstatically the ‘wide and inexhaustible joys of Arnside’, which is on an estuary of the river Kent
River Kent
The River Kent is a short river in the county of Cumbria in England. The river originates in hills surrounding Kentmere, and flows for around 20 miles into the north of Morecambe Bay. The Lake District National Park includes the upper reaches of the river within its boundaries.The river passes...
. The children were free to wander woods and fields, explore the cliffs and coves of the river. In Lucy’s case, the return of Spring, with primroses and fields of wild daffodils, was especially thrilling since in Southport the only signs of Spring were the red and white hawthorns along the streets and her mother never had a single flower in the house. Lucy clearly developed an awareness of plants and gardens at an early age and mentions several times how dull and barren she found the gardens of her childhood. This is significant in the context of her later development as a gardener and the outstanding garden which she created at The Manor.
The return to Southport, after the idyllic year in Westmorland, was hard for Lucy. Every night she wept bitter tears and grieved for all she was now parted from: worn rocks and turf under her feet instead of pavements, ‘the night sounds of the river birds, flocks of sandpipers in flight, curlew
Curlew
The curlews , genus Numenius, are a group of eight species of birds, characterised by long, slender, downcurved bills and mottled brown plumage. They are one of the most ancient lineages of scolopacid waders, together with the godwits which look similar but have straight bills...
s and solitary gull
Gull
Gulls are birds in the family Laridae. They are most closely related to the terns and only distantly related to auks, skimmers, and more distantly to the waders...
s.’ (3)
When she left school Lucy went to a finishing school
Finishing school
A finishing school is "a private school for girls that emphasises training in cultural and social activities." The name reflects that it follows on from ordinary school and is intended to complete the educational experience, with classes primarily on etiquette...
in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
and perhaps the most important event in this ‘gap’ year was that the time came for her to be formally received into the Wesleyan community. To her mother’s horror, she refused. Her mother wept and implored, told her she was ‘lost’, but Lucy remained adamant. ‘Yet as I stepped out of the fold into the unknown I repeated privately to myself, ‘He shall keep my soul until that day’. I knew I was in search, not in denial. The abandonment of one’s father’s faith is a deep fear and sorrow and I felt an outsider.’ She went up to Somerville College, Oxford
Somerville College, Oxford
Somerville College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England, and was one of the first women's colleges to be founded there...
, to read English in Autumn 1914, in the first months of the First World War. During her second term she grew increasingly restless – she wanted to be sharing the experience of her generation. She decided to leave college and go to war as a volunteer nurse. Her ambition was to get to France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, where, as she put it, ‘it was all going on.’ In her memoir, Perverse and Foolish, she gives a full count of her war-time experiences in which she showed all the irreverence for red tape and conventional attitudes which were to become characteristic of her entire life. She was posted to a casualty clearing station
Casualty Clearing Station
A Casualty Clearing Station is the name used by the British Army and the armies of other Commonwealth nations to describe a medical facility behind the front lines that is used to treat wounded soldiers. A CCS would usually be located just outside of the range of enemy artillery and often near...
in France where she befriended wounded soldiers and tried to humanise the stark hospital experience by, for example, playing draughts
Draughts
Draughts is a group of abstract strategy board games between two players which involve diagonal moves of uniform pieces and mandatory captures by jumping over the enemy's pieces. Draughts developed from alquerque...
with them. This activity nearly got her dismissed by the starchy American nurse in charge of the ward, who was outraged to see Lucy sitting on a bed! ‘Nurse, get off that bed at once! Don’t you know it’s unprofessional to sit on a patient’s bed?’
During this time, Lucy’s relationship with her brothers and with her mother’s cousin Harold Boston was close. They, of course, were all serving in the armed forces but any leaves or spare time they had were spent together. Philip, her youngest brother, was reported missing in 1917 when his plane was shot down. Later that same year, Lucy and Harold were married, but following the failure of the marriage in 1935 she wandered in France, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
and Hungary
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
, visiting the musical capitals of Europe. She also studied painting in Vienna and immersed herself in this for the next three or four years. (4)
Lucy’s memoir of her childhood and youth, Perverse and Foolish, published in 1979, ends with her return to England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
in 1937, when she took rooms in Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
where her son, Peter Boston, born in 1918 and now aged nineteen, was an undergraduate at the University. One day, hearing that a house was for sale in the near-by village of Hemingford Grey
Hemingford Grey
- Location:It is situated on the southern bank of the River Great Ouse in the county of Cambridgeshire, with the northern bank occupied by the flood meadow. Until 1965 it was in Huntingdonshire and between 1965 and 1974 it was in the short-lived county of Huntingdon and Peterborough...
, Lucy remembered that years before, in 1915, she had glimpsed from the river a seemingly derelict farmhouse. She jumped to the conclusion that this must be the house for sale, drove out to Hemingford Grey in a taxi, knocked at the door and announced the astonished owners that she would be interested in buying it. It turned out that they had only that morning decided to sell it and that the house advertised for sale was a completely different one. She never did find out which house she should have gone to see.
Another autobiographical memoir, entitled Memory in a House, describes her life thereafter, including the renovation and restoration of The Manor. The whole of that book, actually published before Perverse and Foolish and written when Lucy was eighty-one, can truly be described as an extended love letter to the house. In 1992 the two memoirs were published in chronological order in a single volume, entitled Memories.
The ancient Norman
Norman architecture
About|Romanesque architecture, primarily English|other buildings in Normandy|Architecture of Normandy.File:Durham Cathedral. Nave by James Valentine c.1890.jpg|thumb|200px|The nave of Durham Cathedral demonstrates the characteristic round arched style, though use of shallow pointed arches above the...
Manor house
Manor house
A manor house is a country house that historically formed the administrative centre of a manor, the lowest unit of territorial organisation in the feudal system in Europe. The term is applied to country houses that belonged to the gentry and other grand stately homes...
, built in about 1130, is reputed to be one of the oldest continually inhabited houses in the British Isles
British Isles
The British Isles are a group of islands off the northwest coast of continental Europe that include the islands of Great Britain and Ireland and over six thousand smaller isles. There are two sovereign states located on the islands: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and...
. It became the focus and inspiration for her creativity for the rest of her life. Although work on the garden began as soon as necessary work on the house was finished, in respect of her writing Lucy was a late starter. Her first book, Yew Hall, a novel for adults, was published in 1954 when she was over sixty and she describes it as ‘a poem to celebrate my love of the house.’ There followed a series of children’s books, all set in The Manor, in which she brings to life the people who she imagines might have lived there.
Lucy Boston lived at The Manor for almost fifty years in which time she created the romantic garden which she felt was an appropriate setting for the ancient house, wrote all her children’s books and created over twenty patchwork masterpieces. Surprisingly, and rather frustratingly to anyone interested in the provenance and creation of the patchworks, the only mention of patchwork in Memory in a House comes when she describes repairing an old patchwork hanging in the dining-room, in which every piece of material was pre-1830. As a result, the patchworks were scarcely known about until, in 1976, when the celebrated conductor and keyboard player, Christopher Hogwood
Christopher Hogwood
Christopher Jarvis Haley Hogwood CBE, MA , HonMusD , born 10 September 1941, Nottingham, is an English conductor, harpsichordist, writer and musicologist, well known as the founder of the Academy of Ancient Music.-Biography:...
, who was a close friend, arranged an exhibition of them at the King’s Lynn Festival. Fortunately for us, her daughter-in law, Diana Boston, has been able to tell the story of the patchworks, using a collection of letters which Lucy wrote to her niece, Caroline Hemming, another patchwork enthusiast, as well as catalogues and patchwork paraphernalia amongst her possessions.(5) This painstaking and beautifully presented labour of love was published as The Patchworks of Lucy Boston in 1995. A new edition is now available.
Books
The Green KnoweGreen Knowe
Green Knowe is a series of six books written by Lucy M. Boston, published between 1954 and 1976. They feature a very old house, Green Knowe, which is based on Boston's then-residence, The Manor in Hemingford Grey, Cambridgeshire. Some books in the series feature a boy called Toseland and his...
series:
- The Children of Green Knowe (1954)
- The Chimneys of Green Knowe aka Treasure of Green Knowe (1958)
- The River at Green Knowe (1959)
- A Stranger at Green Knowe (1961)
- An Enemy at Green Knowe (1964)
- The Stones of Green Knowe (1976)
The Green Knowe series was published by Faber and Faber
Faber and Faber
Faber and Faber Limited, often abbreviated to Faber, is an independent publishing house in the UK, notable in particular for publishing a great deal of poetry and for its former editor T. S. Eliot. Faber has a rich tradition of publishing a wide range of fiction, non fiction, drama, film and music...
and also in Puffin Books
Puffin Books
Puffin Books is the children's imprint of British publishers Penguin Books. Since the 1960s it has been the largest publisher of children's books in the UK and much of the English-speaking world.-Early history:...
Other fictional works:
- Yew Hall (1954)
- The Sea Egg (1967)
- The Castle of Yew (1968)
- Persephone aka Strongholds (1969)
- The House That Grew (1969)
- The Horned Man: Or, Whom Will You Send To Fetch Her Away (1970)
- Nothing Said (1971)
- The Guardians of the House (1974)
- The Fossil Snake (1975)
Lucy M. Boston also wrote a short story called "Curfew" which appeared in the anthology The House of the Nightmare: and other Eerie Tales, published in 1967.
In 2011, Boston's supernatural tales were collected in the volume Curfew & Other Eerie Tales (Dublin: Swan River Press). This volume includes unpublished tales as well as a reprint of the two act play The Horned Man.
Perverse and Foolish and Memory in a House were published together in 1992 under the title Memories, with an Introduction by Jill Paton Walsh
Jill Paton Walsh
Jill Paton Walsh, CBE, FRSL is an English novelist and children's writer.Born as Gillian Bliss and educated at St. Michael's Convent, North Finchley, London, she read English Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford...
and linking passage and postscript by Peter Boston. Publisher: Colt Books Ltd. Cambridge.
A 2009 film, From Time To Time
From Time to Time (film)
From Time to Time is a 2009 British adventure film directed by Julian Fellowes and starring Maggie Smith, Carice van Houten, Alex Etel, Eliza Bennett, Elisabeth Dermot-Walsh, Dominic West, Hugh Bonneville, Kwayedza Kureya and Pauline Collins. It was adapted from the children's novel The Chimneys of...
, was written and directed by Julian Fellowes
Julian Fellowes
Julian Alexander Kitchener-Fellowes, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford, DL , known as Julian Fellowes, is an English actor, novelist, film director and screenwriter, as well as a Conservative peer.-Early life:...
, who also wrote Gosford Park
Gosford Park
Gosford Park is a 2001 British-American mystery comedy-drama film directed by Robert Altman and written by Julian Fellowes. The film stars an ensemble cast, which includes Helen Mirren, Maggie Smith, Eileen Atkins, Alan Bates, and Michael Gambon...
(2001). It is based on the second of the books in the Greene Knowe series.
External links
There is an article about Lucy Boston with illustrations of some of the patchworks on the Website, QuiltStory, at this link:http://www.quilt.co.uk/?p=76
In Lucy Boston A Bodley Head Monograph published in 1965, Jasper Rose discusses and anayses Lucy Boston as a children's writer.
A gallery of the real Green Knowe,The Manor at Hemingford Grey
A paper by David Lenander examining the themes in the book The River At Green Knowe, "Crosscurrents in The River at Green Knowe by L.M. Boston"
Synopses, cover art, and reviews at FantasyLiterature.net