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A Dubious Legacy: 1400 Headwords |
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A Dubious Legacy: 1400 Headwords |
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基本信息·出版社：Oxford University Press
·页码：96 页
·出版日期：2003年06月
·ISBN：0194230570
·条形码：9780194230575
·装帧：平装
·正文语种：英语
·丛书名：Oxford Bookworms Library
内容简介 In 1944 Henry Tillotson brings his new wife, Margaret, home to his farmhouse in the English countryside. Margaret is a strange, unpleasant woman, determined, it seems, to make Henry's life miserable. 'Poor Henry!' say his friends, as they visit at weekends and holidays. 'What an awful life he has!' But Henry is not at all the sad and disappointed man we might expect him to be. He manages to enjoy life, and indeed, has quite a lot of fun, one way and another... Mary Wesley's story takes a sharp but light-hearted look at love, sex, and marriage – and the things people will do to get what they want.
作者简介 Mary Wesley was born near Windsor in 1912. Her education took her to the London School of Economics and during the War she worked in the War Office. Although she initially fulfilled her parent's expectations in marrying an aristocrat she then scandalised them when she divorced him in 1945 and moved in with the great love of her life, Eric Siepmann. The couple married in 1952, once his wife had finally been persuaded to divorce him. She used to comment that her 'chief claim to fame is arrested development, getting my first novel [Jumping the Queue] published at the age of seventy'. She went on to write a further nine novels, three of which were adapted for television, including the best-selling The Camomile Lawn. Mary Wesley was awarded the CBE in the 1995 New Year's honour list and died in 2002.
--This text refers to the Paperback edition. 编辑推荐 From Publishers Weekly There is more than one legacy in British author Wesley's ( A Sensible Life ) darkly comic, wise and irresistible new novel of manners. Henry Tillotson's legacy from his dying father is an injunction to help an English divorcee in WW II Egypt. Henry does more than that: he impulsively marries Margaret, to his lifelong regret. For when he returns with her to his country home, she takes to her bed out of pure spite and tries her best to make his life miserable. In an effort to achieve some conviviality, Henry invites two friends, James and Matthew, for a weekend party; each man brings a companion and each proposes marriage. Both women accept, motivated by pragmatism and a need for security. What happens to their marriages, and that of Henry and Margaret, makes up the remainder of the plot. Two couples have children and grandchildren; these are the second legacy, and part of a delicious secret. As usual, Wesley's picture of the British upper middle class is breezy and irreverent; the dialogue is witty and often astonishingly impertinent (one thinks that the English can be shockingly tactless); the plot is laced with irony; the characters--major and minor--are depicted with a master's deft hand. But it is in Margaret, whose monstrously selfish, malicious, eccentric behavior exceeds all rational bounds, that Wesley has created her most memorable character. Readers will root for her comeuppance, and will cheer when it arrives.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. From Library Journal Wesley's world is one of speculation about relationships, gossip, and innuendo. She explores forces that unite and divide friends and lovers. In 1944, Henry Tillotson brings his bride Margaret to his country house, where she takes to her bed and remains in self-indulgent isolation. Ten years later, two younger friends of Henry bring their girlfriends for the weekend. In the years that follow, the two couples marry and return regularly, their mundane lives punctuated by Margaret's eccentric boudoir conversations or scandalous ventures into their company. Henry dies in 1990, attended by his friends' (or his?) daughters, and the reader's visits to Wesley's well-realized world draw to an end with his departure. For readers who appreciate nuances of language and emotion and the incongruities of life, Wesley's book will be a treat.
- Kathy Piehl, Mankato State Univ., Minn.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
