Images and Shadows by Iris Origo - review
In Images and Shadows, Iris Origo takes readers into the Edith Wharton-like atmosphere of her American grandparents’ mansion but can also describe Wharton visiting it and making a catty remark about young Iris. Her rich widowed mother later brought the Villa Medici near Florence where Iris knew Bernard Berenson and others of the international set. But she reacted against it to marry an Italian: she wanted to stop roaming and be tied to one place. With her husband she created an agricultural estate in one of the poorest Tuscan zones which was to be the setting of her best-known book War in the Val d’Orcia.
This autobiography portrays a pre-1914 world, the interwar and post war periods in which she knew people such as Virginia Woolf. She describes it as ‘partial’ which enables her to avoid mention of what is called elsewhere her ‘romantic involvement’ with the novelist L.H.Myers in London in the 1930s. It is less about famous figures than her close family and friends who meant more to her. Chapters are devoted to her grandprents and her parents, childhood at Fiesole, her reading, writing and her education aswell as her Tuscan estate La Foce which is run today by her daughter Bendetta and can be visited. This new edition also has an afterword by one of her granddaughters.
Her Anglo-Irish maternal family was as wealthy as the American forebears. She had a privileged life but says this involved limitations and aligns herself with relatives who were ‘allergic to the taste of their silver spoons.’ When tested by Nazi- Fascist threats in Tuscany during the second World War, she saved many who worked on her estate. Showing that she was tough and courageous not just privileged.
Images and Shadowsis illuminating on what is required of a biographer, including good luck and relentless research as when a descendant of Lord Byron’s last lover, Teresa Guiccioli, gave her their correspondence which he had denied to others or when she was faced with Marco Dantini’s 126000 letters which for hundreds of years had lain in sacks under the stairs of his house in Prato. They were the basis of her biography The Merchant of Prato which NYRB is to republish as the fourth book in its Iris Origo revival.
Images and Shadows: Part of a Life by Iris Origo New York Review Books US price$18.95
