Life in the Garden

Locations
Call Number: Adult Book / Nonfiction / Biography / Literary / Lively, Penelope
On Shelf At: Pittsfield Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Biography / Literary / Lively, Penelope	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Includes index.
Introduction -- Reality and Metaphor -- The Written Garden -- The Fashionable Garden -- Time, Order and the Garden -- Style and the Garden -- Town and Country.
"From the Booker Prize winner and national bestselling author, reflections on gardening, art, literature, and life Penelope Lively takes up her key themes of time and memory, and her lifelong passions for art, literature, and gardening in this philosophical and poetic memoir. From the courtyards of her childhood home in Cairo to a family cottage in Somerset, to her own gardens in Oxford and London, Lively conducts an expert tour, taking us from Eden to Sissinghurst and into her own backyard, traversing the lives of writers like Virginia Woolf and Philip Larkin while imparting her own sly and spare wisdom. "Her body of work proves that certain themes never go out of fashion," writes the New York Times Book Review, as true of this beautiful volume as of the rest of the Lively canon. Now in her eighty-fourth year, Lively muses, "To garden is to elide past, present, and future; it is a defiance of time." "-- Provided by publisher.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Literary with a touch of memoir submitted by mowjac on August 31, 2018, 10:20am I was hoping for more memoir, given Lively's life, and while there are bits of that here, they are small in comparison to the amount of literary criticism and British garden history and design. A certain amount of familiarity with gardening's stars in the UK is necessary to make this book fully accessible to the reader, but mostly it is a bit sedate.