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Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France (P.S. (Paperback)) Kindle Edition
When Nicholas Shakespeare stumbled across a box of documents belonging to his late aunt, Priscilla, he was completely unaware of where this discovery would take him and what he would learn about her hidden past. The glamorous, mysterious figure he remembered from his childhood was very different from the morally ambiguous young woman who emerged from the trove of love letters, photographs, and journals, surrounded by suitors and living the dangerous existence of a British woman in a country controlled by the enemy. He had heard rumors that Priscilla had fought in the Resistance, but the truth turned out to be far more complicated.
As he investigated his aunt's life, dark secrets emerged, and Nicholas discovered the answers to the questions over which he'd been puzzling: What caused the breakdown of Priscilla's marriage to a French aristocrat? Why had she been interned in a prisoner-of-war camp, and how had she escaped? And who was the "Otto" with whom she was having a relationship as Paris was liberated?
Piecing together fragments of one woman's remarkable and tragic life, Priscilla is at once a stunning story of detection, a loving portrait of a flawed woman trying to survive in terrible times, and a spellbinding slice of history.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper
- Publication dateJanuary 7, 2014
- File size11628 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Once I started it I was hooked. And when I realised that she hadn’t been a brave and beautiful spy, I was double-hooked. Its truth is necessary and essential, and makes the last chapters terrifyingly poignant and moving.” — Julian Barnes, author of The Sense of an Ending
“A fascinating, complicated story.” — Entertainment Weekly
“Gripping.” — New York Times Book Review
“A most strange and compelling book driven by the writer’s unsparing search for truth: now an optimistic hunt for a family heroine, now a study in female wiles of survival, now a portrait of one very ordinary person’s frailty in the face of terrible odds.” — John le Carré
“A gripping excavation of a woman’s secret past, Priscilla is also a fascinating portrait of France during the second world war, and of the many shadowy and corrupt deals made by the French with their Nazi occupiers.” — Caroline Moorehead
“As Shakespeare does his research, the mystery of Priscilla begins to recede....She is revealed as possibly less worthy-but maybe more intriguing…Our hunger to know what she thought and felt is a tribute to just how much of her he has been able to put on the page.” — New York Times
“The story that unfolded is remarkable, and his account of it is riveting….Priscilla is, like almost all biographies, necessarily incomplete, but as a picture of France during the dark years of the occupation it is wonderfully full of light and shade, sympathetic and highly intelligent.” — Wall Street Journal
“Fascinating….Shakespeare probes his aunt’s wartime years with finesse and pathos….His reconstruction of Priscilla’s life is meticulous and tantalizing.” — Boston Globe
“This mysterious story of the Occupation in France has all the qualities of a fascinating novel, with exquisite social, sexual and moral nuance.” — Antony Beevor
“In Priscilla, Nicholas Shakespeare captures the soul of a young Englishwoman who, to survive in Nazi-occupied France, is forced to make choices which few in England ever had to face. She remained her own unflinching judge and jury to the end.” — Charlotte Rampling
“Shakespeare has employed all his superb gifts to tell the picaresque tale of his aunt in occupied France. Priscilla is a femme fatale worthy of fiction, and the author traces her tangled, troubled, romantic and often tragically unromantic experiences through one of the most dreadful periods of 20th century history.” — Max Hastings
“Extraordinary true story of the author’s aunt. A life of dark secrets, glamour, adventure and adversity during wartime.” — Woman & Home
“Thrilling.….An intimate family memoir, a story of survival and a quest for biographical truth.” — Tatler
“Remarkable….A detailed and vivid narrative. This is a moving, and constantly surprising story.” — The Independent
“A fine book, full of hurried journeys and secret liaisons, by one of Britain’s best writers.” — Conde Nast Traveller
“A wonderful book….I have not read a better portrait of the moral impossibility of that time and place for people, like Priscilla, who found themselves trapped in it.” — Daily Telegraph
“A gripping narrative….Shakespeare offers a nuanced and detailed psychological study of the effect of the Second World War on an ordinary woman. The result is just as absorbing as any biography of a war hero.” — London Sunday Times
“Letters, journals and memories of family and friends are woven seamlessly with accounts of life in occupied Paris to reveal the precarious existence of a British woman in France during World War II….Intriguing.” — Daily Express
“Gripping….[An] extraordinary voyage into the truth….Priscilla brilliantly exposes the tangled complexities behind that question so easily asked from the comfort of a peacetime armchair: ‘What would I have done?’” — The Observer
“[A] wonderfully readable quest for answers….[Shakespeare] builds a nuanced, sensitive portrait of this sad and glamorous member of his family….As the life of Priscilla shows, surviving the occupation was too complicated an affair for any black-and-white verdict.” — The Economist
“A tantalizingly original perspective of the Second World War….In his engaging detective story, as he pieces Priscilla’s war years together, Shakespeare shines a moving, intriguing light on the moral quandaries faces by ordinary citizens.” — London Sunday Times, Best Book of the Year Citation
“Impossible to put down.” — Mail on Sunday, a Book of the Year Pick
“An excellently researched, beautifully written and unflinching memoir.” — Evening News, (UK)
“Mesmerising….A tremendous portrait of a world of war that is only ever glimpsed out of the corner of an eye. It is a haunting, powerful book about the gaps in the record and about the terrible abysses that are revealed when they are filled in.” — Sydney Morning Herald
From the Back Cover
When Nicholas Shakespeare stumbled across a box of documents belonging to his late aunt, Priscilla, he was completely unaware of where this discovery would take him and what he would learn about her hidden past. The glamorous, mysterious figure he remembered from his childhood was very different from the morally ambiguous young woman who emerged from the trove of love letters, photographs, and journals, surrounded by suitors and living the dangerous existence of a British woman in a country controlled by the enemy. He had heard rumors that Priscilla had fought in the Resistance, but the truth turned out to be far more complicated.
As he investigated his aunt's life, dark secrets emerged, and Nicholas discovered the answers to the questions over which he'd been puzzling: What caused the breakdown of Priscilla's marriage to a French aristocrat? Why had she been interned in a prisoner-of-war camp, and how had she escaped? And who was the "Otto" with whom she was having a relationship as Paris was liberated?
Piecing together fragments of one woman's remarkable and tragic life, Priscilla is at once a stunning story of detection, a loving portrait of a flawed woman trying to survive in terrible times, and a spellbinding slice of history.
About the Author
Nicholas Shakespeare's books have been translated into twenty languages. They include The Vision of Elena Silves, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and The Dancer Upstairs, which was made into a film of the same name by John Malkovich. His nonfiction includes the critically acclaimed authorized biography of Bruce Chatwin. Shakespeare is married with two sons and lives in Oxford.
Product details
- ASIN : B00DB3DA64
- Publisher : Harper; Reprint edition (January 7, 2014)
- Publication date : January 7, 2014
- Language : English
- File size : 11628 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 453 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #978,922 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,636 in WWII Biographies
- #2,947 in History eBooks of Women
- #3,872 in World War II History (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Nicholas Shakespeare was born in 1957. His novels have been translated into twenty languages. They include The Vision of Elena Silves, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and The Dancer Upstairs, which was chosen by the American Library Association in 1997 as the year's best novel, and in 2001 was made into a film of the same name by John Malkovich. Bruce Chatwin, Shakespeare's biography of the British novelist, was published in 2000 to widespread critical acclaim. Shakespeare is married with two sons and currently lives in Oxford.
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Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
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In reading the reviews it seems the principal criticism some readers have with the book is that Priscilla isn’t the heroic figure Shakespeare assumed. Anyone considering reading the book needs to understand this is not an uplifting tale. Priscilla is in no way heroic or noble. She is at times frankly unlikeable. And that is even before she lands in Occupied France. Late in the book when former friends turn against her you will wonder only what took them so long.
However, Priscilla’s character flaws do not make her uninteresting. If anything I’d argue Shakespeare’s story becomes more fascinating because Priscilla lives in a morally ambiguous situation and her behavior reflects the choices and compromises one had to make to endure in Occupied France. And then she had to live the rest of her life knowing and clearly sublimating the choices she had to make during that time. It’s a surprise but somehow realistic that when you discover Priscilla’s post Occupation regret it’s almost the last thing you’d expect. Priscilla clearly operated on her own ever shifting moral code.
Additionally, Shakespeare does a fine job of placing Priscilla’s actions within the context of her times. Her parents were clearly absolute disasters who alternated between giving her catastrophically bad advice or ignoring her altogether. Unsurprisingly she then fell into relationships with poorly chosen men. And by a combination of wrong choices and pure stubbornness Priscilla ended up one of a very few English women in occupied France.
Shakespeare writes that when filmmaker Louis Malle checked with a historian about the plausibility of an event occurring in a film set in Occupied France the historian said he could set any event during that period because everything happened there. This book gives you a sense of how precarious a life Priscilla lived day to day during those years. And as he points out no one living through that time had any idea how long Nazi occupation would last. As she shifted between lies, lovers, even identities Priscilla had no idea how long she had left. Could she have made better choices, absolutely? But life never worked out for her like that. Not in childhood, certainly not during the war, and her post-war years were clouded by regrets and alcohol.
What one is left with is the portrait of a life that while lived never really came together. Priscilla’s entire life was thwarted by bad choices, regret and unanswered questions. She never really managed to meet the right man at the right time. She never really seemed to make the right choices in friendship much less in life. She slept with the wrong men and fell in love with the worst of the lot. Even her faith which should have provided her solace left her with regret and doubt. Her life was dramatic before the war and after it a serious of small triumphs intermixed with years and years of sadness and regret. It is as fascinating a life, as it is tragic and it made for an incredibly compelling reading.
The story is weakened by too many details and too many men, but the pace does protect us readers from too much horror and too much terror too rapidly. Priscilla was, in addition to being sad, also always frightened, even as a child with nightmares, too frightened for me to deal with every moment.
Was she a wicked collaborator? Well, she was not active in the resistance. Given her looks, her intellectual limitations, her family and social situation, she certainly would have had a hard time being ordinary. I would just leave it that she was not gifted with the ability to provide moral or political leadership, and did not exclude Nazi collaborators from an amazing array of men of many types.
But her life is more interesting than this question, which can be blown up too much since it is so dramatic. Readers should be advised to be prepared to skip judiciously some detailed and tedious parts, and to not depend too much on the collaborator question. As WWII history and biography, this is an interesting and well-written book.
Top reviews from other countries
The daughter of an in his time eminent, but now almost forgotten, journalist and broadcaster called S.P.B. Mais, she was disadvantaged from birth by her parents' separation, her father's remarriage and abandonment of her to an extremely unsympathetic mother, and a general neglect of her talents which, for both ballet dancing and literary composition, were considerable.ment of
An unplanned pregnancy - in those days, of course, unforgivable - followed by a botched illegal abortion insisted on by her mother, left Priscilla permanently infertile. This tragedy, only gradually realised, blighted her life as (like so many other people who, neglected in childhood, try to reclaim the happiness they never knew by cherishing offspring of their own) her greatest desire in the world was to give birth to a baby.
Having married a French aristocrat - who sadly, due to difficulties of his own, proved unable to assist her in achieving that ambition - Priscilla found herself trapped in France by the Nazi invasion of May 1940. Released, finally, from a horrible internment camp for enemy aliens, she embarked on a wandering and financially precarious existence with a series of lovers and, in the process, became involved with several French Resistance members and - at least - one prominent Nazi.
Following arrest by the Gestapo, from whose attentions she was rescued - only just - by the prominent Nazi, her subsequent plight and the conflicting emotions, not to mention the practical difficulties, which Priscilla's life subsequently involved can only be imagined by present-day readers but my goodness, does Nicholas Shakespeare help us to imagine them! This book is un-put-downable - GENUINELY un-put-downable, which is not a thing I often find, but I was up all night reading it.
It is well written, and meticulously researched (the references occupy ten per cent of the book's pages) and altogether heart-rending. A triumph!
It has, of course, already been serialised as a BBC morning story.