Boulevard Brogues

Rosemary Hill

  • Girlitude: A Memoir of the Fifties and Sixties by Emma Tennant
    Cape, 224 pp, £15.99, April 1999, ISBN 0 224 05952 1

In the 15 years her memoir covers Emma Tennant transformed herself. The poised, if slightly stolid-looking debutante of 1955 was, by the end of the Sixties, a three-times-married, chronically hard-up, left-wing novelist. There was little more to wish for. Given the temper of the times and the Tennant family’s established bohemian tendencies it was not such a surprising trajectory. But all lives are surprising to those who live them. Tennant evokes, sometimes with too much vividness to be entirely coherent, the bewildering experience of a life lived forwards by someone who never considers herself its heroine and indeed often seems to herself to be struggling for a speaking part.

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