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Images and Shadows: Part of a Life
The autobiography of Iris Origo, this book recounts her childhood divided between three different worlds, New York, Ireland and Italy; her marriage to Antonio Origo, and her work with refugee children, feeding partisans and helping Allied prisoners-of-war during the German occupation.
278 pages, Hardcover
First published October 26, 1970
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751 people want to read
About the author
Iris Origo
26 books32 followersIris Origo was a British-born biographer and writer. She lived in Italy and devoted much of her life to the improvement of the Tuscan estate at La Foce, which she purchased with her husband in the 1920s. During the Second World War, she sheltered refugee children and assisted many escaped Allied prisoners of war and partisans in defiance of Italy’s fascist regime and Nazi occupied forces. She is the author of Images and Shadows; A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939–1940 (NYRB Classics); Leopardi: A Study in Solitude; and The Merchant of Prato, among others.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 36 reviews
March 17, 2022
This bears a family resemblance to Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, in a few striking features. One is a childhood milieu of fin de siècle cosmopolitan wealth, where, having eluded tutors and governesses, the solitary trilingual child is free to wander woods and picture galleries, and to read through a fine library (or to precociously appoint tutors, as Origo did). In the autobiographical style, a tension of proud privacy and the need, as artists, to communicate visions, the images of their idiosyncratic spirituality. And both books ponder the examples of heroic fathers dead before their time (tuberculosis, right-wing assassin), warm, cultivated, sensitive, public-spirited men whose conduct aimed far past mere noblesse oblige, into works of risk and sacrifice they performed in the conviction that “civilization is the guardian of justice,” as Yourcenar would say.
Because Bayard Cutting was a favored pupil of Santayana’s at Harvard, and Edith Wharton, in A Backward Glance, mourned him as a promising poet, I was surprised that Origo treated her father as a mostly public figure - or as one yearning, despite illness, to be so. As US consul at Messina and coordinator of international relief after the 1908 earthquake, Cutting drew years from his life standing “up to his neck in sea-water during a storm, helping to tug in a rowing-boat carrying stores, which had nearly capsized,” among many other exertions. He wrote his brother Bronson, also tubercular, an editor and future United States Senator from the salubriously arid state of New Mexico, and an ally of Roosevelt, “I am too ashamed of the figure we cut as a nation - possessing I think the best individuals, the best raw material, to be found anywhere - to take even a moderate interest in other aspects of American life, compared to the political.” But the Bayard Cutting eulogized by Wharton and tutored by Santayana was perhaps not quite the Cutting whose short, strenuous career of service inspired his daughter in her own public works - the land improvement at La Foce, the creation of schools and clinics in the valley; her participation in the anti-Fascist salons; the sheltering of Jews, refugees and escaped Allied POWs, the nursing of wounded Partisans; and, after the war, the education and adoption of war orphans. She was the coiffed lady in the Red Cross jeep, following the armies. It seems her equally fascinating mother was aesthete enough for both parents.
Because Bayard Cutting was a favored pupil of Santayana’s at Harvard, and Edith Wharton, in A Backward Glance, mourned him as a promising poet, I was surprised that Origo treated her father as a mostly public figure - or as one yearning, despite illness, to be so. As US consul at Messina and coordinator of international relief after the 1908 earthquake, Cutting drew years from his life standing “up to his neck in sea-water during a storm, helping to tug in a rowing-boat carrying stores, which had nearly capsized,” among many other exertions. He wrote his brother Bronson, also tubercular, an editor and future United States Senator from the salubriously arid state of New Mexico, and an ally of Roosevelt, “I am too ashamed of the figure we cut as a nation - possessing I think the best individuals, the best raw material, to be found anywhere - to take even a moderate interest in other aspects of American life, compared to the political.” But the Bayard Cutting eulogized by Wharton and tutored by Santayana was perhaps not quite the Cutting whose short, strenuous career of service inspired his daughter in her own public works - the land improvement at La Foce, the creation of schools and clinics in the valley; her participation in the anti-Fascist salons; the sheltering of Jews, refugees and escaped Allied POWs, the nursing of wounded Partisans; and, after the war, the education and adoption of war orphans. She was the coiffed lady in the Red Cross jeep, following the armies. It seems her equally fascinating mother was aesthete enough for both parents.
June 21, 2021
2021: "Nor is it much consolation to know that while life is actually going on, is constantly distracted by irrelevancies. . . It is only in memory that the true essence remains" (258). I love Origo's attempt to reflect and to capture this "true essence."
2020:At the end of her autobiography Origo reflects on lost love ones – her father, young son, and a dear friend While the pain of their loss never ceases, she also feels that love still makes her loved one real and present: “My personal experience has given me a very vivid sense of the continuity of love” (267). Origo goes on to cite Burke's sense of the community as including not only the living but also the dead and the unborn. She adds, “Not only are we not alone, but we are not living only in a bare and chilly now. We are irrevocably bound to the past – and no less irrevocably, though the picture is less clear to us, to the future” (267). This “continuity of love” is what makes Origo's memoir, and actually all good memoir and biography such a compelling genre for me – the voice of a past person making their loves real and present again.
2010: A reflective, beautifully written account of an amazing life. Origo's family and her own life embraced Italy, America, Ireland, and England. She lived among influential expatriates in Florence, helped revive wasteland in southern Tuscany, and experienced WWII at first-hand. She decides to focus on what life was like across the generations of her life rather than on more intimate family details, although she has some great growing up and courtship stories. Omission of other intimate details is understandable, although I was happy to have Caroline Moorehead's biography to fill me in on for instance, what happened to her son Gianni and what more of her relationships might have been like. Still the omissions Origo makes, the choices of what she wanted to omit and preserve in her account also provide significant insight into her character. This is a wonderful book that I read over and over.
This edition is nicely printed, but the cover is not happy. The image of Origo is sliced out of a photo of herself and her son Gianni, and the glowing background looks eery.
2020:At the end of her autobiography Origo reflects on lost love ones – her father, young son, and a dear friend While the pain of their loss never ceases, she also feels that love still makes her loved one real and present: “My personal experience has given me a very vivid sense of the continuity of love” (267). Origo goes on to cite Burke's sense of the community as including not only the living but also the dead and the unborn. She adds, “Not only are we not alone, but we are not living only in a bare and chilly now. We are irrevocably bound to the past – and no less irrevocably, though the picture is less clear to us, to the future” (267). This “continuity of love” is what makes Origo's memoir, and actually all good memoir and biography such a compelling genre for me – the voice of a past person making their loves real and present again.
2010: A reflective, beautifully written account of an amazing life. Origo's family and her own life embraced Italy, America, Ireland, and England. She lived among influential expatriates in Florence, helped revive wasteland in southern Tuscany, and experienced WWII at first-hand. She decides to focus on what life was like across the generations of her life rather than on more intimate family details, although she has some great growing up and courtship stories. Omission of other intimate details is understandable, although I was happy to have Caroline Moorehead's biography to fill me in on for instance, what happened to her son Gianni and what more of her relationships might have been like. Still the omissions Origo makes, the choices of what she wanted to omit and preserve in her account also provide significant insight into her character. This is a wonderful book that I read over and over.
This edition is nicely printed, but the cover is not happy. The image of Origo is sliced out of a photo of herself and her son Gianni, and the glowing background looks eery.
December 1, 2020
Last year I read Iris Origo's A Chill in the Air, the 1st of her diaries chronicling the war years in the Val d'Orcia region of Tuscany. I thought it interesting, but it didn't begin to suggest the richness of Origo's much larger autobiography Images and Shadows: Part of a Life. Much of her life's story involves her and husband Antonio's decision, early in their marriage, to buy and begin restoration of the system of Tuscan farms which came to be known as La Foce. The story here declines to repeat the narratives of the 2 WWII diaries. I was more caught up in Origo's growing up as Iris Cutting, a child of British/American privilege. She was launched into society in both countries but was most at home in Italy where her father, who died when she was 7, had wanted his daughter to grow up where she didn't belong to the strong nationalistic ties prevalent around WWI and after. She and her husband, as we know, became Tuscan landowners in the 1920s, and she herself became a biographer. The story of her ancestry and her own education and young adulthood running to over half of Images and Shadows is marked by her accomplished, fluid prose style honed, I suspect, by her years of writing biography. The narrative of her ancestries, her parents, and even relationships with servants is so sumptuously and affectionately written that I was always eager to return to the next chapter, the next phase of her life. Admittedly, I found the story of her marriage and the major project of their lives together, the development of their La Foce estate, less engaging. This may be because, as the "Afterword" of her granddaughter Katia Lysy points out, Origo deliberately chose to omit personal details. And I found the particulars of developing Tuscan farms to be not very interesting. However, her strong, virtuoso prose seasoned with her affection for Tuscany and everyone who ever lived there is addictive.
November 1, 2018
Iris Origo was a wonderful writer and a fascinating person. I have read three of her books since returning from Italy where I visited La Foce, her home and farm in Southern Tuscany; I could hardly put any of them down. "A Chill in the Air" and "War in Val d'Orcia" are diaries of life in Italy and on the farm during the run-up to WWII and the final days of WWII in the Italian theater. They have an immediacy which is striking and convincing in a way that an after-the-fact summary cannot be. "Images and Shadows" is her memoir, beautifully written. So glad I was introduced to her and that these books are available.
August 31, 2020
The most memorable figure in Iris Origo's book is her maternal grandfather, the Anglo-Irish Earl of Desart. In the early 1900s, while his daughter Olivia and younger brother Otway were swooning to the Irish mythic revivalism of Yeats and Lady Gregory, he told them, “I know you think me a Philistine… Of course there is a charm in all these fancies, but sooner or later they lead to cruelty and trouble. There is danger in every denial of reason.” The family house of Desart Court was burnt to the ground in the Troubles and he left Ireland forever, reflecting that “a half-educated population is worse in its results than an ignorant one,” a lesson we may be forced to relearn in our own day.
More amusingly, Lord Desart was once summoned by the king for the purpose - so he assumed - of discussing the Irish question. But in fact the monarch wanted to talk about their shared preference for night shirts over pajamas.
Iris Origo and her grandfather were devoted to one another and kept up a decades-long correspondence that matured with the years. “I believe that love in marriage is better than anything in life,” he wrote to her shortly after the death of her grandmother. “Ambition and success are not in the running with it. My real life has always been my home... It is a happy record.”
There are other memorable portraits in Origo’s book: the wealthy American grandparents on her father’s side and their wonderful Long Island estate; eccentric aunts and uncles; her father who, with all his youthful ambitions in ashes, finally died of tuberculosis on a boat trip up the Nile when Iris was eight years old; and her mother Olivia, who settled Iris and herself in the 15th century Villa Medici at Fiesole near Florence and filled their home with art and artists.
Iris was an awkward, lonely girl, wealthy and privileged but rootless, as her father had intended her to be. In a letter to Olivia written shortly before his death, he asked her to raise their only child “free from all this national feeling that makes people so unhappy. Bring her up somewhere where she does not belong, so that she may be able to decide her own life.” She was bookish, educated at home by a string of private tutors, and frequently dragged off by her mother on far-flung travels.
Sometimes the chances of travel were illuminating. Origo recalls an afternoon in Algeria, near the beginning of Ramadan, when she had wandered off from her hotel to the edge of the village and stumbled on a scene to remind her that books are never quite enough:
“The desert tribesmen were already gathering for the great annual festival and, squatting round a fire, soon after sunset, some of them were listening to a story-teller. I could not, of course, understand what he was saying, but this was hardly necessary. Every phrase of the story, every dramatic movement, was reflected in the bearded faces of the listeners – taut with apprehension as some crisis approached, quivering with sensual delight over a love scene or with cruelty and blood-lust at the climax of a fight, rising to their feet to shake their fists and interrupt the narrator with hoarse comments and cries, shaking with Gargantuan laughter over some Rabelaisian episode. This, I thought – as more and more listeners came from their tents or camels to join the circle, the firelight accentuating the lights and shadows on every face, the story-teller’s voice quickened by his audience’s response – this is how Homer must have told the story of Polyphemus or of the stealing of Helen; this is how men must have listened to the tales of the quarrels of the gods before the camp-fires of Troy, and, in a later day, to the story of Tristan and Iseult, and of Childe Roland’s horn. Every written word is only a thin substitute for this, and perhaps it is man’s desire to return to it that has brought about the success of the radio and of television: the need to have beauty and terror and laughter brought to us, not by books, but by the human voice.”
In a passage about the ilex woods and old Etruscan well behind their home at Fiesole, Origo captures the occult thrills of childhood and the melancholy of growing up:
“To dare oneself to venture into its shadows at twilight, to smell the dank rotting leaves and feel one’s foot slipping in the wet earth beside the well, was, for a solitary child, adventure enough. It was not a dread of ‘robbers’ or even of any ghosts of the past that overcame one then, but an older, more primitive fear – half pleasurable, wholly absorbing. It is one of the penalties of growing up that these apprehensions and intuitions gradually become blunted. The wall between us and the other world thickens. What was a constant, if unformulated, awareness, becomes just a memory. It is only very rarely, as the years go on, that a trap-door opens in the memory and a whiff of half-forgotten scents, a glimpse of the mysteries, reaches us once again.”
The first half of Images and Shadows, from which all these things are drawn, is magical. The second half – ostensibly dedicated to Origo’s own life and family after she and her Italian husband bought the estate of La Foce in a remote Tuscan valley – is a series of asides, and oddly dull by comparison. Her brief reflections on Italian Fascism under Mussolini are interesting. Her experience of WWII as the Allies pushed up the peninsula through La Foce is better described in her journal War in Val d’Orcia, which I read earlier this year.
It may seem odd that a woman who made her name as a biographer (beginning with Leopardi: A Study in Solitude, a life of the Italian poet) should balk at autobiography, but Origo clearly disliked talking about herself and was jealous of her privacy. A biographer’s passion may not extend to the biographer’s self. Origo writes that “the biographer’s real business – if it is not too arrogant to say so – is simply this: to bring the dead to life. If he succeeds it does not matter a rap whether his subject was great or humble, good or bad; and any other information that may come to light in the process is only relevant in so far as it makes the dead man a little more alive.” But there is no miracle in the resurrection of those still living.
Some say that as we age our memories of childhood and youth grow brighter and more significant. Images and Shadows (the title is a reference to Plato’s allegory of the cave) was written when Origo was in her later sixties, and so perhaps it’s natural that her earlier memories make the better part of the book. Distance clarifies things, shows us what counts. “All that is left to me of my past life that has not faded into mist has passed through the filter, not of my mind, but of my affections,” she writes. “What was not warmed by them is now for me as if it had never been.”
Thinking perhaps of her grandfather Lord Desart, whose uncomplicated love for her was such a strong anchor in her life, she concludes:
“In the long run – the very long run – of any deep relationship, who is the giver and who the receiver? In what scales can affection be weighed, and its transmuting power? How far may the ripples in the pool extend, even after the people directly concerned have ceased to exist? One cannot answer these questions: one can only wonder.”
More amusingly, Lord Desart was once summoned by the king for the purpose - so he assumed - of discussing the Irish question. But in fact the monarch wanted to talk about their shared preference for night shirts over pajamas.
Iris Origo and her grandfather were devoted to one another and kept up a decades-long correspondence that matured with the years. “I believe that love in marriage is better than anything in life,” he wrote to her shortly after the death of her grandmother. “Ambition and success are not in the running with it. My real life has always been my home... It is a happy record.”
There are other memorable portraits in Origo’s book: the wealthy American grandparents on her father’s side and their wonderful Long Island estate; eccentric aunts and uncles; her father who, with all his youthful ambitions in ashes, finally died of tuberculosis on a boat trip up the Nile when Iris was eight years old; and her mother Olivia, who settled Iris and herself in the 15th century Villa Medici at Fiesole near Florence and filled their home with art and artists.
Iris was an awkward, lonely girl, wealthy and privileged but rootless, as her father had intended her to be. In a letter to Olivia written shortly before his death, he asked her to raise their only child “free from all this national feeling that makes people so unhappy. Bring her up somewhere where she does not belong, so that she may be able to decide her own life.” She was bookish, educated at home by a string of private tutors, and frequently dragged off by her mother on far-flung travels.
Sometimes the chances of travel were illuminating. Origo recalls an afternoon in Algeria, near the beginning of Ramadan, when she had wandered off from her hotel to the edge of the village and stumbled on a scene to remind her that books are never quite enough:
“The desert tribesmen were already gathering for the great annual festival and, squatting round a fire, soon after sunset, some of them were listening to a story-teller. I could not, of course, understand what he was saying, but this was hardly necessary. Every phrase of the story, every dramatic movement, was reflected in the bearded faces of the listeners – taut with apprehension as some crisis approached, quivering with sensual delight over a love scene or with cruelty and blood-lust at the climax of a fight, rising to their feet to shake their fists and interrupt the narrator with hoarse comments and cries, shaking with Gargantuan laughter over some Rabelaisian episode. This, I thought – as more and more listeners came from their tents or camels to join the circle, the firelight accentuating the lights and shadows on every face, the story-teller’s voice quickened by his audience’s response – this is how Homer must have told the story of Polyphemus or of the stealing of Helen; this is how men must have listened to the tales of the quarrels of the gods before the camp-fires of Troy, and, in a later day, to the story of Tristan and Iseult, and of Childe Roland’s horn. Every written word is only a thin substitute for this, and perhaps it is man’s desire to return to it that has brought about the success of the radio and of television: the need to have beauty and terror and laughter brought to us, not by books, but by the human voice.”
In a passage about the ilex woods and old Etruscan well behind their home at Fiesole, Origo captures the occult thrills of childhood and the melancholy of growing up:
“To dare oneself to venture into its shadows at twilight, to smell the dank rotting leaves and feel one’s foot slipping in the wet earth beside the well, was, for a solitary child, adventure enough. It was not a dread of ‘robbers’ or even of any ghosts of the past that overcame one then, but an older, more primitive fear – half pleasurable, wholly absorbing. It is one of the penalties of growing up that these apprehensions and intuitions gradually become blunted. The wall between us and the other world thickens. What was a constant, if unformulated, awareness, becomes just a memory. It is only very rarely, as the years go on, that a trap-door opens in the memory and a whiff of half-forgotten scents, a glimpse of the mysteries, reaches us once again.”
The first half of Images and Shadows, from which all these things are drawn, is magical. The second half – ostensibly dedicated to Origo’s own life and family after she and her Italian husband bought the estate of La Foce in a remote Tuscan valley – is a series of asides, and oddly dull by comparison. Her brief reflections on Italian Fascism under Mussolini are interesting. Her experience of WWII as the Allies pushed up the peninsula through La Foce is better described in her journal War in Val d’Orcia, which I read earlier this year.
It may seem odd that a woman who made her name as a biographer (beginning with Leopardi: A Study in Solitude, a life of the Italian poet) should balk at autobiography, but Origo clearly disliked talking about herself and was jealous of her privacy. A biographer’s passion may not extend to the biographer’s self. Origo writes that “the biographer’s real business – if it is not too arrogant to say so – is simply this: to bring the dead to life. If he succeeds it does not matter a rap whether his subject was great or humble, good or bad; and any other information that may come to light in the process is only relevant in so far as it makes the dead man a little more alive.” But there is no miracle in the resurrection of those still living.
Some say that as we age our memories of childhood and youth grow brighter and more significant. Images and Shadows (the title is a reference to Plato’s allegory of the cave) was written when Origo was in her later sixties, and so perhaps it’s natural that her earlier memories make the better part of the book. Distance clarifies things, shows us what counts. “All that is left to me of my past life that has not faded into mist has passed through the filter, not of my mind, but of my affections,” she writes. “What was not warmed by them is now for me as if it had never been.”
Thinking perhaps of her grandfather Lord Desart, whose uncomplicated love for her was such a strong anchor in her life, she concludes:
“In the long run – the very long run – of any deep relationship, who is the giver and who the receiver? In what scales can affection be weighed, and its transmuting power? How far may the ripples in the pool extend, even after the people directly concerned have ceased to exist? One cannot answer these questions: one can only wonder.”
March 25, 2025
Loved her writing and her partial life story. Her life was so different, but still, elements are the same about life now. I am looking forward to reading her books about time during WWII in Tuscany.
November 29, 2019
October 2019 NYRB Book Club Selection
For a while there, I thought I might not finish this one and it would be my first NYRB white flag of the year. This is the second Iris Origo selection in so many years and I expected to struggle with it, as I didn’t much care for A Chill In The Air and that one was about 200 pages shorter than this. And for the first 200 pages, I was right - I just could not get into or care about the lives described, primarily those of her very wealthy, very affluent grandparents and parents, and her early childhood of travel and luxury. Then, all of a sudden it got good, as Origo began to describe her love of reading, how writing shaped her life, and her time in La Foce, all of which was very interesting and intriguingly composed. By the end, it becomes clear that the subtitle is quite true - this is only part of her life, the public part, and obfuscated are her personal feelings for her husband, her surviving daughters, the affair she had following her son’s death. Yet, all memoirs are like this - things must always be left out - and the scope of a life can never be truly realized. This comes close though. Two stars for the first half, four for the second, averaged to three.
For a while there, I thought I might not finish this one and it would be my first NYRB white flag of the year. This is the second Iris Origo selection in so many years and I expected to struggle with it, as I didn’t much care for A Chill In The Air and that one was about 200 pages shorter than this. And for the first 200 pages, I was right - I just could not get into or care about the lives described, primarily those of her very wealthy, very affluent grandparents and parents, and her early childhood of travel and luxury. Then, all of a sudden it got good, as Origo began to describe her love of reading, how writing shaped her life, and her time in La Foce, all of which was very interesting and intriguingly composed. By the end, it becomes clear that the subtitle is quite true - this is only part of her life, the public part, and obfuscated are her personal feelings for her husband, her surviving daughters, the affair she had following her son’s death. Yet, all memoirs are like this - things must always be left out - and the scope of a life can never be truly realized. This comes close though. Two stars for the first half, four for the second, averaged to three.
July 22, 2016
I enjoy reading this autobiography but at the same time, it is not a life changing story and I am not sure I would recommend it to anyone. The most fascinating is probably to see the changes that occured over her lifetime, in particular how the wars change lifes. She focuses on a couple of relationships that had a big impact on her life, in particular her grandfather. At the same time, it is interesting how she doesn't talk much about her husband and barely at all about her daughters. She spends a lot of time on her youth and the golden life she had as a young wealthy girl. I wished she spend more time talking about the work her and her husband did in their Italian estate.
March 10, 2021
Iris Origo's "War in Val d'Orcia" was one of the better books about war that I have ever read. Origo is an interesting and insightful writer and I looked forward to reading this memoir.
The book is far from a conventional autobiography, as it only covers limited portions of Origo's life and avoids most personal details, mostly those involving her husband, children and her rumored extramarital relationships. Origo concentrates on her childhood, her experiences living on both sides of the Atlantic before settling in Italy, and her development of her estate in Tuscany.
Origo had a very privileged life due to her great wealth, and I think that many would have difficulty relating to her experiences. Still, she is a skilled writer and I never found the book to be uninteresting. I thought that her section on writing was very well done and her relating of her Italian experiences, particularly her recounting some of her experiences during the war, was rewarding to read. Perhaps the strongest section was the epilogue, where she let her guard down a bit and described her emotions related to the loss of her son and a close friend. There is also an afterword from her granddaughter which fills in a few details.
This is a well-written account of selected portions of an interesting and unusual life, and is well worth reading.
The book is far from a conventional autobiography, as it only covers limited portions of Origo's life and avoids most personal details, mostly those involving her husband, children and her rumored extramarital relationships. Origo concentrates on her childhood, her experiences living on both sides of the Atlantic before settling in Italy, and her development of her estate in Tuscany.
Origo had a very privileged life due to her great wealth, and I think that many would have difficulty relating to her experiences. Still, she is a skilled writer and I never found the book to be uninteresting. I thought that her section on writing was very well done and her relating of her Italian experiences, particularly her recounting some of her experiences during the war, was rewarding to read. Perhaps the strongest section was the epilogue, where she let her guard down a bit and described her emotions related to the loss of her son and a close friend. There is also an afterword from her granddaughter which fills in a few details.
This is a well-written account of selected portions of an interesting and unusual life, and is well worth reading.
October 27, 2022
A somewhat sterile autobiography
There is no doubt that Iris Origo was a compelling woman who did much for Italy and especially for the people and land of Tuscany. I had trouble relating to her very privileged upbringing. What I would have liked to know -- more of her marriage and family and personal life -- she was not willing to reveal. I learned more about her from her granddaughter's afterword than her own writing. Thus, while an interesting read, I found it rather sterile.
There is no doubt that Iris Origo was a compelling woman who did much for Italy and especially for the people and land of Tuscany. I had trouble relating to her very privileged upbringing. What I would have liked to know -- more of her marriage and family and personal life -- she was not willing to reveal. I learned more about her from her granddaughter's afterword than her own writing. Thus, while an interesting read, I found it rather sterile.
August 4, 2025
Half New York old money, half Anglo-Irish nobility Iris Cutting had an oddly isolated privileged childhood.She grew up mainly in Villa Medici in Fiesole with her eccentric widowed mother, and married her Florentine husband Antonio Origo when she was 22. I found Images and Shadows most interesting in the descriptions of her grandparents. Origo’s writing is graceful and descriptive and she’s good at characterizations of her ancestors and the many tenant farmers who live on her huge farm in Val d’Orcia. Oddly, the book is very reserved on Origo’s personal life with her husband and daughters.
August 5, 2022
4.5 One volume of a trilogy by author Iris Origo. In this one she writes about her life from childhood to year of writing. The other two books are from her diaries during WWII when she was living in Tuscany which, at times, served as a battlefield. The entire set is very interesting from her pre-war life traveling the world as a child with her mother, rebuilding a Tuscan villa and its accompanying farmhouses and life in an occupied country (Italy).
October 28, 2020
After reading the introduction and first chapter, I didn't think I would finish this book, but then it got better and better, a fascinating autobiography by a very cosmopolitan and courageous woman, and she lived in interesting times including WWII in Italy, but there is a certain stodginess to the writing, 3.3
September 14, 2025
It was thanks to a March Read Like the Wind newsletter from the New York Times that I discovered this book. Both her fascinating family and her own life are so exotic, viewed from an "ordinary" American perspective. There was one section about writing that I found slow-going, but on the whole I was delighted with this book.
April 16, 2020
Well written. Memoir of a wealthy woman who used her wealth for the common good. I did not realize that until the afterword by her granddaughter. She never delves into her personal relationships-she does not mention her daughters or her son. She barely mentions her husband.
November 1, 2019
Her writing is absolutely wonderful. Great account of being a rich lady in the first half of the 20th Century without being obnoxious.
January 26, 2020
A good book I didn’t really ever enjoy. The mild detachment around severe topics sours.
August 9, 2020
An interesting memoir of nineteenth and twentieth century American blue bloods who love in the US and Europe.
I loved the historical bits and the views of both WWI and WWII.
I loved the historical bits and the views of both WWI and WWII.
November 5, 2020
Intriguing life. Lovely writer. But not compelling read Partv1only
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February 18, 2024It shows that evolution is vital through lifetime of a person, really liked it 💓💓💓
April 4, 2024
This book was published in 1970, a biographer who is recounting her own story however this story really doesn't tell you much about Iris Origo.
August 28, 2024
very good memoir and a little peek into a lost era…better than the nabokov memoir
May 4, 2025
An elegiac, bittersweet and beautifully written memoir of a life well lived. Highly recommended.
August 17, 2025
stopped half way - I was hoping for a story that engaged with the person's life AND the political backdrop of the time. It seemed to focus more on the former and that part of the story did not engage me, so I stopped.
April 10, 2012
I read this autobiography right after rereading Origo's masterpiece, "War in Val d'Orcia." Not quite on that level, but an interesting life beautifully rendered. If you're in a hurry, skip through the chapters on ancestors to her childhood among the arty English colony in Florence during World War I. The character sketches of that crowd are worth the price of admission. Iris fell in love with Italy (and an Italian marchese) and never left, even in the darkest days of WWII.
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June 12, 2012An autobiography of Iris Origo, who lived for 45+ years at La Foce near Pienza, Italy. Besides chapters on her American and British origins, there are sections on each parent. Interesting background, well written. But the highlight is the 50 page section on La Foce, the home that Iris and her husband Antonio created from a semi abandoned house and nearly untillable land.
La Foce is in some ways a main character in her earlier War Comes to Val'Dorcia, itself a wonderful book.
La Foce is in some ways a main character in her earlier War Comes to Val'Dorcia, itself a wonderful book.
December 21, 2008
This is probably for Iris Origo fans only. She was a wonderful writer and a fascinating person. It's a selective memoir, in no sense a complete autobiography. As one discovers by reading the later biography of Iris by Caroline Whitehead, much is omitted, especially concerning her romantic indiscretions. Read War in Val d'Orcia first.
December 25, 2012
I loved reading about the people who made a home at Westbrook, where I enjoy walking and having tea with family and friends. Th villa at Tuscany, where Iris enjoyed a home as a child and an adult, sounds so welcoming and it is definitely on my travel list!
May 13, 2008
iris origo is an amazing writer. she is of a totally different generation than me, which made me more curious about her life. this is one of my mom's favorite books. a wonderful memoir.
December 24, 2008
"A masterly biographer here recounts her own story, and in this biography she is at her best."
- Raymond Mortimer
- Raymond Mortimer
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