A true-life account of the author's years from age 18 to 30, which also happens to be a memoir of the 1950s and '60s. The book opens with Emma's coming-out ball and then - funny, sad, shocking by turns - tells of her numerous marriages, and her encounters with gambling, satire and revolution.
In
Strangers, her first foray into biography, Emma Tennant chronicled the lives of her eccentric, aristocratic forebears and their Scottish Gothic castle, Glen, in a languid, romantic memoir. Her next instalment, the delightfully entitled
Girlitude: A Portrait of the 50s and 60s, concentrates on Tennant's own "long adolescence" from 18 to 30, her three marriages, her lovers, her experiences as a magazine journalist and first-time novelist, all set against the back-drop of the post-war boom of the 1950s and the free love and revolution of the 1960s.
Tennant writes in glittering, witty prose of her life at this time: one of the last debutantes to be presented at court, she became a young woman lurching from one marriage to the next, with a small child to support, a fledgling writing career and a host of connections on the London literary scene. She remained dependent on her parents until her late 20s and never felt she had grown up until her daughter was born in 1969. "If I have given birth to a woman, I ponder afterwards, can I at last give up being a girl?" Wry and poignant by turns, Girlitude is a sparkling portrait of the writer's golden years, and a vivid account of her changing times. --Catherine Taylor
