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More Was Lost: A Memoir
Best known for her classic book Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden, Eleanor Perényi led a worldly life before settling down in Connecticut. More Was Lost is a memoir of her youth abroad, written in the early days of World War II, after her return to the United States. In 1937, at the age of nineteen, Perényi falls in love with a poor Hungarian baron and in short order acquires both a title and a struggling country estate at the edge of the Carpathians. She throws herself into this life with zeal, learning Hungarian and observing the invisible order of the Czech rule, the resentment of the native Ruthenians, and the haughtiness of the dispossessed Hungarians. In the midst of massive political upheaval, Perényi and her husband remain steadfast in their dedication to their new life, an alliance that will soon be tested by the war. With old-fashioned frankness and wit, Perényi recounts this poignant tale of how much was gained and how much more was lost.
228 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 1, 1946
33 people are currently reading
652 people want to read
About the author
Eleanor Perényi
7 books6 followersEleanor Spencer Stone Perényi (1918-2009) was a gardener and author on gardening.
She wrote Green Thoughts, a collection of essays based on her own experiences as a gardener. The book drew on her work on her husband’s castle (described in her 1946 publication More Was Lost). Green Thoughts was reviewed by Brooke Astor in The New York Times.
Perenyi was given an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1982.
(from Wikipedia)
She wrote Green Thoughts, a collection of essays based on her own experiences as a gardener. The book drew on her work on her husband’s castle (described in her 1946 publication More Was Lost). Green Thoughts was reviewed by Brooke Astor in The New York Times.
Perenyi was given an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1982.
(from Wikipedia)
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September 5, 2019
In 1937, a nineteen year old American named Eleanor Stone, whose father was a military attaché to the American Embassy in Paris and whose mother was a successful novelist, was charmed by a young Hungarian nobleman at a dinner party held at the American legation in Budapest.
Baron Zsigmon Perényi (Zsiga) called on her the next day, they spent much of the rest of her week in Budapest together; and on her last evening, they went out to dinner.
All of this was written about with such charm, and this is how she recalled that evening when she came to write this memoir:
At last he said, “It’s a pity we are both so poor.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because otherwise we could perhaps marry.”
I looked into my wineglass.
“Yes, we could,”
There was another pause which seemed to me interminable. Then he said, “Do you think you could marry me anyway?”
“I think I could decidedly.”
So we were engaged.
Eleanor’s parents, reasonably concerned about the speed of the romance, the youth of their daughter and the prospect of her leaving them for a new life in a part of the world they didn’t know, insisted on a year’s engagement with the young lovers returning to their own worlds. They agreed, but the romance didn’t die and they were married. Zsiga gave up his job in Budapest, so that he and his ancestral home, Szöllös.
Young and in love, Eleanor was charmed by the prospect.
A young couple are supposed to be lucky if they can build their own home. It may be so. For me, the theory did not work that way. My favorite idea as a child was what happened in French fairy stories. You were lost in a forest, and suddenly you came on a castle, which in some way had been left for you to wander in. Sometimes, of course, there were sleeping princes, but in one special one there were cats dressed like Louis XIV, who waited on you. Sometimes it was empty, but it always belonged to you without any effort on your part. Maybe it’s incorrigible laziness, but I like things to be ready-made. And when I went into my new home, I had just the feeling of the child’s story. It was all there waiting for me. This house was the result of the imaginations of other people. If a chair stood in a certain corner it was because of reasons in the life of someone who had liked it that way. I would change it, of course, but what I added would only be part of a long continuity, and so it would have both a particular and a general value. If we had built it, it would certainly have been more comfortable, and perhaps even more beautiful, but I doubt it, and I should have missed this pleasure of stepping into a complete world. And there would have been no thrill of discovery. As it was, I ran from room to room, examining everything. I liked it all.
Fortunately she was also clear-sighted, because her new life came with many complications.
Though the young couple’s assets were substantial – a baroque property, 750 acres of gardens and farmland, a vineyard, a distillery and a sizeable forest – and they were far from poor, they didn’t have the capital that they needed to restore the dilapidated property and to run the estate as they felt they should. And though Zsiga was Hungarian, his estate wasn’t in Hungary anymore: it was part of the territory given to the Czechs after WWI, and he needed a passport and permission from the authorities before he could travel there.
Eleanor threw herself into her new life: finding out how to manage the household and the the gardens; learning to speak Hungarian; meeting neighbours and playing her part in local society; and having a lovely time rearranging and furnishing the rooms of her new home, and picking through possessions left behind by earlier generations of the Perényi family.
She was particularly proud of the new library that she created:
This was filled with things to look at. There were the books and the maps; and this room, too, was frescoed. On the vaulted ceiling there were four panels, representing the seasons of the year. In the firelight, with the red brocade curtains drawn, this room seemed to vibrate with faint motion. Everything moved and looked alive, the gleaming backs of the books, the shadowy little figures on the ceiling, and the old Turk over the fireplace.
I loved the author’s voice, and I found it wonderfully engaging. It caught her youthful enthusiasm and her love of what she was learning and doing, and it was wonderfully clear and unpretentious. She wasn’t afraid to be critical – of dirty trains, for example – but I never doubted for a moment that she was looking back with love.
She wrote beautifully, of her life on the estate, of changing of the seasons, the people she met and the things she saw, and with exactly the right details and description to convey exactly what it was like to anyone reading her words.
But she had that life for not very long at all before her world was shaken:
What I know of what happened in the next week of the world crisis I learned later from old copies of Time. Our only source of news, the radio, was taken away from us. All radio sets in the town were ordered turned in. We were presumably going to get our news from a loudspeaker in the town hall. They never set this up. It just meant we had no news of any kind. Then came the order for the farm horses and carriages to be turned in to the army. This was a pretty clear indication that the Czechs were getting ready for a mobilization …
Suddenly, the couple had to decide where it was best to live, when to leave or return to a particular country, how to cope during air raids, how to manage their estate during a time of insecurity and upheaval, and what to do if Zsiga was called up for military service. The life-changing decisions that they were forced to make as the political situation escalated were clear, terribly difficult and heart-breaking.
It wouldn’t be fair to say more – and I’d recommend not reading the very good introduction, that explains more about what happened during and after the war, before you read the book itself – but please do read this book, if you have any interest at all in the period or the setting.
‘More Was Lost’ captures a vanished world, people who lived and loved in that world, and the life-changing choices set before them quite perfectly.
Baron Zsigmon Perényi (Zsiga) called on her the next day, they spent much of the rest of her week in Budapest together; and on her last evening, they went out to dinner.
All of this was written about with such charm, and this is how she recalled that evening when she came to write this memoir:
At last he said, “It’s a pity we are both so poor.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because otherwise we could perhaps marry.”
I looked into my wineglass.
“Yes, we could,”
There was another pause which seemed to me interminable. Then he said, “Do you think you could marry me anyway?”
“I think I could decidedly.”
So we were engaged.
Eleanor’s parents, reasonably concerned about the speed of the romance, the youth of their daughter and the prospect of her leaving them for a new life in a part of the world they didn’t know, insisted on a year’s engagement with the young lovers returning to their own worlds. They agreed, but the romance didn’t die and they were married. Zsiga gave up his job in Budapest, so that he and his ancestral home, Szöllös.
Young and in love, Eleanor was charmed by the prospect.
A young couple are supposed to be lucky if they can build their own home. It may be so. For me, the theory did not work that way. My favorite idea as a child was what happened in French fairy stories. You were lost in a forest, and suddenly you came on a castle, which in some way had been left for you to wander in. Sometimes, of course, there were sleeping princes, but in one special one there were cats dressed like Louis XIV, who waited on you. Sometimes it was empty, but it always belonged to you without any effort on your part. Maybe it’s incorrigible laziness, but I like things to be ready-made. And when I went into my new home, I had just the feeling of the child’s story. It was all there waiting for me. This house was the result of the imaginations of other people. If a chair stood in a certain corner it was because of reasons in the life of someone who had liked it that way. I would change it, of course, but what I added would only be part of a long continuity, and so it would have both a particular and a general value. If we had built it, it would certainly have been more comfortable, and perhaps even more beautiful, but I doubt it, and I should have missed this pleasure of stepping into a complete world. And there would have been no thrill of discovery. As it was, I ran from room to room, examining everything. I liked it all.
Fortunately she was also clear-sighted, because her new life came with many complications.
Though the young couple’s assets were substantial – a baroque property, 750 acres of gardens and farmland, a vineyard, a distillery and a sizeable forest – and they were far from poor, they didn’t have the capital that they needed to restore the dilapidated property and to run the estate as they felt they should. And though Zsiga was Hungarian, his estate wasn’t in Hungary anymore: it was part of the territory given to the Czechs after WWI, and he needed a passport and permission from the authorities before he could travel there.
Eleanor threw herself into her new life: finding out how to manage the household and the the gardens; learning to speak Hungarian; meeting neighbours and playing her part in local society; and having a lovely time rearranging and furnishing the rooms of her new home, and picking through possessions left behind by earlier generations of the Perényi family.
She was particularly proud of the new library that she created:
This was filled with things to look at. There were the books and the maps; and this room, too, was frescoed. On the vaulted ceiling there were four panels, representing the seasons of the year. In the firelight, with the red brocade curtains drawn, this room seemed to vibrate with faint motion. Everything moved and looked alive, the gleaming backs of the books, the shadowy little figures on the ceiling, and the old Turk over the fireplace.
I loved the author’s voice, and I found it wonderfully engaging. It caught her youthful enthusiasm and her love of what she was learning and doing, and it was wonderfully clear and unpretentious. She wasn’t afraid to be critical – of dirty trains, for example – but I never doubted for a moment that she was looking back with love.
She wrote beautifully, of her life on the estate, of changing of the seasons, the people she met and the things she saw, and with exactly the right details and description to convey exactly what it was like to anyone reading her words.
But she had that life for not very long at all before her world was shaken:
What I know of what happened in the next week of the world crisis I learned later from old copies of Time. Our only source of news, the radio, was taken away from us. All radio sets in the town were ordered turned in. We were presumably going to get our news from a loudspeaker in the town hall. They never set this up. It just meant we had no news of any kind. Then came the order for the farm horses and carriages to be turned in to the army. This was a pretty clear indication that the Czechs were getting ready for a mobilization …
Suddenly, the couple had to decide where it was best to live, when to leave or return to a particular country, how to cope during air raids, how to manage their estate during a time of insecurity and upheaval, and what to do if Zsiga was called up for military service. The life-changing decisions that they were forced to make as the political situation escalated were clear, terribly difficult and heart-breaking.
It wouldn’t be fair to say more – and I’d recommend not reading the very good introduction, that explains more about what happened during and after the war, before you read the book itself – but please do read this book, if you have any interest at all in the period or the setting.
‘More Was Lost’ captures a vanished world, people who lived and loved in that world, and the life-changing choices set before them quite perfectly.
April 30, 2016
I hadn't heard of Eleanor Perenyi before this book was selected by NYRB for its Feb. selection for the book of the month.
At a very young age, Perenyi made a Hungarian Baron and goes to live on his rather improvised estate. It is an unlikely marriage, but works until world wide events happen, in particular the outbreak of World War II.
The selling point of the book is Perenyi's tone which is gossipy and chatty. It also captures a place and time that are long gone.
At a very young age, Perenyi made a Hungarian Baron and goes to live on his rather improvised estate. It is an unlikely marriage, but works until world wide events happen, in particular the outbreak of World War II.
The selling point of the book is Perenyi's tone which is gossipy and chatty. It also captures a place and time that are long gone.
February 22, 2019
First published in 1946 (and now back in print courtesy of NYRB Classics), More Was Lost is a remarkable memoir by the American-born writer, editor and keen gardener, Eleanor Perényi. In essence, the memoir covers the early years of Eleanor’s marriage to Zsiga Perényi, a relatively poor Hungarian baron whom she meets while visiting Europe with her parents in 1937. It’s a gem of a book, both charming and poignant in its depiction of a vanishing and unstable world, all but swept away by the ravages of war. I hope to find a place for it in my end-of-year highlights.
To read my review, please click here:
https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2019...
To read my review, please click here:
https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2019...
September 24, 2021
Full disclosure: I'm generally a fiction reader and memoirs are not usually my thing. However, over the years I've grown to trust the curators over at the New York Review of Books Classics.
In 1937, nineteen year old Eleanor meets and falls in love with Hungarian baron Zsiga Perenyi. Although a long established aristocratic family, the baron's family is struggling financially. After a short courtship they marry and move to his family estate at the foot of the Carpathian mountains. The first half of the book describes an almost idyllic life where the couple attempt to reinvigorate the estate's many struggling businesses with Eleanor quickly learning Hungarian and meeting various members of their local community and Zsiga's interesting extended family. In the book's second half, the realities of the coming war begin to creep into and interrupt their lives.
I found this memoir fascinating throughout. Eleanor and Zsiga are unpretentious, likeable people struggling to make a life together at a time of great calamity. Highly recommended. Cheers!
In 1937, nineteen year old Eleanor meets and falls in love with Hungarian baron Zsiga Perenyi. Although a long established aristocratic family, the baron's family is struggling financially. After a short courtship they marry and move to his family estate at the foot of the Carpathian mountains. The first half of the book describes an almost idyllic life where the couple attempt to reinvigorate the estate's many struggling businesses with Eleanor quickly learning Hungarian and meeting various members of their local community and Zsiga's interesting extended family. In the book's second half, the realities of the coming war begin to creep into and interrupt their lives.
I found this memoir fascinating throughout. Eleanor and Zsiga are unpretentious, likeable people struggling to make a life together at a time of great calamity. Highly recommended. Cheers!
March 9, 2016
author's (she was from usa) chronicle of marrying a hungarina baron, moving to the half-abandoned family farm/vineyard/orchard/tobacco farm/distillery at the base of carpathian mountains in very eastern hungary/Czechoslovakia/carpatho-ukraine/ruthenia/rumania/old austro hungarian empire/turned fascists/turned communist area.
she meets and marries in 1937. you can imagine, perhaps, what happens next.
i wonderful addition to pre-wwii "regular" life, and the choices all peoples were forced to make.
has pictures. and great introduction by j d mcclatchy
she meets and marries in 1937. you can imagine, perhaps, what happens next.
i wonderful addition to pre-wwii "regular" life, and the choices all peoples were forced to make.
has pictures. and great introduction by j d mcclatchy
November 1, 2016
Eleanor Stone, an American, meets a young Hungarian baron (educated at Oxford) while travelling in Europe and marries at the tender age of nineteen. She goes to live on his estate in Ruthenia near the Carpathian mountains. “More Was Lost”, her memoir, reads at first like a series of sketches portraying an idyllic life on a large estate.
“We walked over the fields toward an acacia-shaded road. The earth was fine and crumbly under our feet. I had not expected to feel very much about the land. It was the house and the garden that I had thought of. But I was wrong. The land was the reason for everything. And standing there, we felt rich. We wondered what everyone had meant by saying we had no money, and no future, and should not marry. Nonsense! At that moment, we felt we had everything.”
The first two-thirds of this poignant narrative is about her life on the estate, learning to speak Hungarian (she already speaks French and Italian), and becoming familiar with the 750 acre property of gardens, orchards, and vineyards. When one considers the cultural adjustments alone on top of the adjustment of marriage at such a young age, and learning a new language, it all seems very overwhelming... but Eleanor seems to take it all in stride:
“Gyorffy (her tutor) spoke German and Russian as well as Hungarian, and I spoke French and a little Spanish and Italian. We kept a pile of dictionaries beside us. We followed words from Hungarian to German to French to English, because none of our dictionaries and the right two languages. A Hungarian-English dictionary would have solved the problem, but we never got around to getting one. And really there was nothing like the satisfaction we felt when we had run a word down. We sat beaming because, for a moment, we understood each other.”
Eleanor is enjoying meeting neighbors, furnishing a large home, and learning all about making the estate self-sufficient. She is caught up in her new life and marriage...and then suddenly war is looming on the horizon and everything changes.
“What I know of what happened in the next week of the world crisis I learned later from old copies of Time. Our only source of news, the radio, was taken away from us. All radio sets in the town were ordered turned in. We were presumably going to get our news from a loudspeaker in the town hall. They never set this up. It just meant we had no news of any kind. Then came the order for the farm horses and carriages to be turned in to the army. This was a pretty clear indication that the Czechs were getting ready for a mobilization...”
We today know of the escalating world affairs that were imminent; if we were living during that time I wonder how we would do with such a precipitous sequence of events ahead. Decisions needed to be made such as where to live, when to leave a country (or if), how to function normally during an air raid, how to keep a large estate functioning during a time of overwhelming insecurity and upheaval.
A fast read for me (I kept on wanting to find out what was going to happen to this young couple and their estate), it was also poignant, descriptive, and sad. It describes a vanishing world and the persons caught up in it, and the life-changing choices set before them.
This book brought home to me how important it is to have a strong, sure foundation to rely upon when everything surrounding your world is changing.
“We walked over the fields toward an acacia-shaded road. The earth was fine and crumbly under our feet. I had not expected to feel very much about the land. It was the house and the garden that I had thought of. But I was wrong. The land was the reason for everything. And standing there, we felt rich. We wondered what everyone had meant by saying we had no money, and no future, and should not marry. Nonsense! At that moment, we felt we had everything.”
The first two-thirds of this poignant narrative is about her life on the estate, learning to speak Hungarian (she already speaks French and Italian), and becoming familiar with the 750 acre property of gardens, orchards, and vineyards. When one considers the cultural adjustments alone on top of the adjustment of marriage at such a young age, and learning a new language, it all seems very overwhelming... but Eleanor seems to take it all in stride:
“Gyorffy (her tutor) spoke German and Russian as well as Hungarian, and I spoke French and a little Spanish and Italian. We kept a pile of dictionaries beside us. We followed words from Hungarian to German to French to English, because none of our dictionaries and the right two languages. A Hungarian-English dictionary would have solved the problem, but we never got around to getting one. And really there was nothing like the satisfaction we felt when we had run a word down. We sat beaming because, for a moment, we understood each other.”
Eleanor is enjoying meeting neighbors, furnishing a large home, and learning all about making the estate self-sufficient. She is caught up in her new life and marriage...and then suddenly war is looming on the horizon and everything changes.
“What I know of what happened in the next week of the world crisis I learned later from old copies of Time. Our only source of news, the radio, was taken away from us. All radio sets in the town were ordered turned in. We were presumably going to get our news from a loudspeaker in the town hall. They never set this up. It just meant we had no news of any kind. Then came the order for the farm horses and carriages to be turned in to the army. This was a pretty clear indication that the Czechs were getting ready for a mobilization...”
We today know of the escalating world affairs that were imminent; if we were living during that time I wonder how we would do with such a precipitous sequence of events ahead. Decisions needed to be made such as where to live, when to leave a country (or if), how to function normally during an air raid, how to keep a large estate functioning during a time of overwhelming insecurity and upheaval.
A fast read for me (I kept on wanting to find out what was going to happen to this young couple and their estate), it was also poignant, descriptive, and sad. It describes a vanishing world and the persons caught up in it, and the life-changing choices set before them.
This book brought home to me how important it is to have a strong, sure foundation to rely upon when everything surrounding your world is changing.
August 24, 2020
The opening of Eleanor Perenyi’s memoir’s like a fairy-tale or the pitch for a particularly escapist romcom. It’s 1937, 19-year-old American, Eleanor, visiting Europe with her mother, meets Zsiga an impoverished Hungarian baron, they fall in love, after a brief romance marry, and move to his elegant but dilapidated, family estate near the Carpathian Mountains. Eleanor plunges into domestic duties: supervising an army of servants, learning about the land, how to run a vineyard, even learning despised Hungarian – like characters in a Tolstoy novel the local landowners much prefer French or even German to their native language, and tellingly it’s Tolstoy’s Levin that Eleanor thinks about when she sums up Zsiga’s personality.
Eleanor reminded me of countless women in books from the period, the kind who routinely stride out in tweeds gamely tackling any and all challenges. When she mentions reading Rebecca it’s Beatrice not the gauche, unnamed, narrator that Eleanor brings to mind; even her prose has a brisk, matter-of-fact quality, except when she’s describing the surrounding landscape. But she’s naïve about regional prejudices, accepting claims of a harmonious, ‘natural order’ where gypsies do backbreaking labour and commerce’s left to the Jewish community; she despises the Nazis yet doesn’t recognise the threat posed by Hungarian fascism,
“I could not see that Hungarians were anti-Semitic…I must have been wrong. Horthy’s last words were an apology for Hungary’s treatment of her Jews. He says the Germans forced it upon her, but it is difficult to believe that even the Germans could have forced this on an unwilling population. It makes me think I must have been very much mistaken, but I can only say what I saw, which was that the Jews were looked down on, but only because they engaged in all the things, which in other countries are the province of the middle class.”
Then war arrives and Eleanor’s carefully-constructed world falls apart.
This only really worked for me as social history, a record of a lost way of life. Eleanor just didn’t interest me. For most of her story, she’s infuriatingly one-dimensional; instead of focusing on her viewpoint, I kept wondering what a more accomplished, or entertaining, or even more opinionated, writer could have done with the same material.
Eleanor reminded me of countless women in books from the period, the kind who routinely stride out in tweeds gamely tackling any and all challenges. When she mentions reading Rebecca it’s Beatrice not the gauche, unnamed, narrator that Eleanor brings to mind; even her prose has a brisk, matter-of-fact quality, except when she’s describing the surrounding landscape. But she’s naïve about regional prejudices, accepting claims of a harmonious, ‘natural order’ where gypsies do backbreaking labour and commerce’s left to the Jewish community; she despises the Nazis yet doesn’t recognise the threat posed by Hungarian fascism,
“I could not see that Hungarians were anti-Semitic…I must have been wrong. Horthy’s last words were an apology for Hungary’s treatment of her Jews. He says the Germans forced it upon her, but it is difficult to believe that even the Germans could have forced this on an unwilling population. It makes me think I must have been very much mistaken, but I can only say what I saw, which was that the Jews were looked down on, but only because they engaged in all the things, which in other countries are the province of the middle class.”
Then war arrives and Eleanor’s carefully-constructed world falls apart.
This only really worked for me as social history, a record of a lost way of life. Eleanor just didn’t interest me. For most of her story, she’s infuriatingly one-dimensional; instead of focusing on her viewpoint, I kept wondering what a more accomplished, or entertaining, or even more opinionated, writer could have done with the same material.
August 10, 2025
This was such a vivid first person account of a time and place - I was absolutely mesmerized and read the entire book in one sitting! If there is one thing I love about a book, it's vivid writing that makes you feel you are there. And this one has so many details too. I am glad I picked up this old book that one day I had been at the library (old as it was published in 1946)...
So I had never heard of Eleanor Perenyi before and I admit I really don't know much about Hungary either. But Eleanor is an American woman who got married to man from Hungary named Zsiga. He was a landowner but poor money wise. People told her not to marry him but they got married in Italy. He did own a huge house, fruit orchard, a dairy, farm land, a forest, grape fields, etc. But it's 1937 and she has a very different life in front of her. Including trying to learn the language.
Apparently there are certain common American phrases you can't say in Hungarian. That surprised her but I was surprised too!
And this may sound totally bizarre but this memoir was more of a page turner than that murder mystery -thriller book I had finished earlier today! I am very serious about that too. I just couldn't put this book down. All of the details of the life she was describing was fascinating to me. Like she states they stored nuts up in the attic. Why?? Why were they kept up in the attic? Root vegetables like carrots were stored in sand. Onions were hung from the ceiling somehow. Basically it tells you how various foods were stored before refrigeration.
There was a part of the book where she and her husband went to visit a friend in another town. There were going to go hunting. Rabbits and pheasant. Well there was more information in here I found very interesting. It was about the physical stamina that they had and the stamina that she had... She didn't have any. For breakfast she chose to eat very little, only bread and butter. They feasted on meat, fish, bacon. They could walk and ride horses all day, then stay up all night too. Her legs were skinny. And she realized in here her lack and inability to do what they did was diet related. She even stated that the European was physically stronger than the Americans.
Well this American has great stamina because I am on a meat based diet. And I don't get sick either. Just have all of these food allergies and environmental ones too.
But this book seems to agree with the diet and yet it was written so long ago. I always find it interesting to see how people were eating so long ago.
This book also tells her experience of being in Europe during World War II until she left on a boat to return to America. Because it just wasn't safe anymore. But there are great descriptions in here of seeing soldiers marching down the streets, of traveling on trains to France (and how one suspicious person thought she was a spy) and of hiding during air raid sirens. I could sort of relate to the air raid sirens as it must be similar to hiding out during the tornado sirens. There is that uncertainty. I guess bombing planes and tornadoes have something in common: you don't ever know where they are going to go.
The social problems she had living there were interesting too, especially her attempts to socialize with "society". It certainly wasn't what she was expecting...
I really don't know how someone could get married to someone and then go off to live in a foreign country where you have never been before. But that's exactly what she did. Is that bravery? I don't know. It certainly involves a lot of trust.
But before the war started, their operation was almost self sufficient. They did hire people to do things, like reupholster furniture, make drapes, etc but they grew most of the food themselves. They even had a greenhouse and animals too. The majority of people today wouldn't know how to do this. They wouldn't know how to live without a refrigerator and without a bunch of other stuff either.
Another fascinating thing in here was the fact allergies of any sort were not mentioned. Even though she was an American who had moved to Europe (as I have often read that people moving from one continent to another often triggers allergies these days). Makes me wonder how common any type of allergy was before world war 2. I do know that most of the older people from that generation say they never heard of food allergies.
The book doesn't describe any fighting from the war but her husband does join the service.
I am sure different people will get different things out of this book, depending on what you are interested in... A lot of it is her learning how to run a large property and about the barter system they were using.
The book also includes black and white photos.
The end was kind of .... Open ended? Mysterious? But I presume that is how it was for her too. Due to the war.
But I am truly surprised how hooked I got on this book. I certainly didn't expect that...and I read a good chunk of this during a thunderstorm too. Lightning is flashing like crazy outside as I write this review.
So I had never heard of Eleanor Perenyi before and I admit I really don't know much about Hungary either. But Eleanor is an American woman who got married to man from Hungary named Zsiga. He was a landowner but poor money wise. People told her not to marry him but they got married in Italy. He did own a huge house, fruit orchard, a dairy, farm land, a forest, grape fields, etc. But it's 1937 and she has a very different life in front of her. Including trying to learn the language.
Apparently there are certain common American phrases you can't say in Hungarian. That surprised her but I was surprised too!
And this may sound totally bizarre but this memoir was more of a page turner than that murder mystery -thriller book I had finished earlier today! I am very serious about that too. I just couldn't put this book down. All of the details of the life she was describing was fascinating to me. Like she states they stored nuts up in the attic. Why?? Why were they kept up in the attic? Root vegetables like carrots were stored in sand. Onions were hung from the ceiling somehow. Basically it tells you how various foods were stored before refrigeration.
There was a part of the book where she and her husband went to visit a friend in another town. There were going to go hunting. Rabbits and pheasant. Well there was more information in here I found very interesting. It was about the physical stamina that they had and the stamina that she had... She didn't have any. For breakfast she chose to eat very little, only bread and butter. They feasted on meat, fish, bacon. They could walk and ride horses all day, then stay up all night too. Her legs were skinny. And she realized in here her lack and inability to do what they did was diet related. She even stated that the European was physically stronger than the Americans.
Well this American has great stamina because I am on a meat based diet. And I don't get sick either. Just have all of these food allergies and environmental ones too.
But this book seems to agree with the diet and yet it was written so long ago. I always find it interesting to see how people were eating so long ago.
This book also tells her experience of being in Europe during World War II until she left on a boat to return to America. Because it just wasn't safe anymore. But there are great descriptions in here of seeing soldiers marching down the streets, of traveling on trains to France (and how one suspicious person thought she was a spy) and of hiding during air raid sirens. I could sort of relate to the air raid sirens as it must be similar to hiding out during the tornado sirens. There is that uncertainty. I guess bombing planes and tornadoes have something in common: you don't ever know where they are going to go.
The social problems she had living there were interesting too, especially her attempts to socialize with "society". It certainly wasn't what she was expecting...
I really don't know how someone could get married to someone and then go off to live in a foreign country where you have never been before. But that's exactly what she did. Is that bravery? I don't know. It certainly involves a lot of trust.
But before the war started, their operation was almost self sufficient. They did hire people to do things, like reupholster furniture, make drapes, etc but they grew most of the food themselves. They even had a greenhouse and animals too. The majority of people today wouldn't know how to do this. They wouldn't know how to live without a refrigerator and without a bunch of other stuff either.
Another fascinating thing in here was the fact allergies of any sort were not mentioned. Even though she was an American who had moved to Europe (as I have often read that people moving from one continent to another often triggers allergies these days). Makes me wonder how common any type of allergy was before world war 2. I do know that most of the older people from that generation say they never heard of food allergies.
The book doesn't describe any fighting from the war but her husband does join the service.
I am sure different people will get different things out of this book, depending on what you are interested in... A lot of it is her learning how to run a large property and about the barter system they were using.
The book also includes black and white photos.
The end was kind of .... Open ended? Mysterious? But I presume that is how it was for her too. Due to the war.
But I am truly surprised how hooked I got on this book. I certainly didn't expect that...and I read a good chunk of this during a thunderstorm too. Lightning is flashing like crazy outside as I write this review.
October 20, 2020
It was a bad year for young American women to marry Hungarian barons, but Eleanor Stone would not be dissuaded. “I paid very little attention to the people who warned me when I married Zsiga that I was proposing to live on a volcano.” It was 1937 but no war or threat thereof has ever canceled spring. She was nineteen when she wed Zsigmond Perényi and made her new home on his family estate of Szollos at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains.
Life at Szollos was part fairy tale and part Russian novel. They lived in a castle surrounded by gardens. They owned a farm and a forest and a vineyard. They went hunting with eccentric nobles who reminisced about the glory days of empire. They were patrons of the parish church and lived as semi-feudal lords over a stretch of picturesque countryside and its many colorful inhabitants.
Then the ground began to shift. Government control of the land was passed from the Czechs to the Hungarians, then to the Ruthenians, and then to the Hungarians again. More than once the Perényis buried their valuables and left, wondering if they’d ever return. As German influence expanded into Central Europe, their corner of the map became temporarily more stable, since Hungary was Germany’s ally. Germany had invaded Poland and was at war with France and England, but they enjoyed a summer of awkward peace at Szollos – awkward since their personal sympathies were with the Allies but they owed their reprieve to Hitler.
“Then one day when I took my afternoon walk in the garden, I heard the sound of cannon. Over the Carpathians something was happening. We had heard no sound of guns before. The war was in western Poland, not near us. This could mean only one thing. The Russians must be going in. I watched the gardener put in some special black tulip bulbs I had ordered from Pest. The white sheep dogs bounded happily around us. And the sound of cannon came again.”
It’s tempting to compare Eleanor Perényi’s book with other memoirs of the same era. It lacks the immediacy of Iris Origo’s War in Val D’Orcia and the scope and erudition of Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon or Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Between the Woods and Water. But perhaps more effectively than these others, More Was Lost records the seduction of faith in the notion that things will find their accustomed course – that the worst will not happen after all. It’s a portrait of the painful ironies and choices that may fall on those who find themselves caught in a territory (literal or metaphorical) disputed over by social forces that care nothing for individual lives.
The honeymoon on the volcano ends when pregnant Eleanor finally – at the last possible minute – leaves husband and home to find safety across the Atlantic. Before she knew it, a chapter in her own life – and in the life of the world – had closed forever.
“So it is that one passes insensibly from one part of life to another, from the past into the future. It isn’t usually as complete as that, that is the only difference. You are never given so much as a glimpse of what you will become, and perhaps it is just as well. It is not nearly as bad as being born, because you are helped by recollection. For a long time the memory of the past sustains you, and when it no longer does, you are already a different person.”
Life at Szollos was part fairy tale and part Russian novel. They lived in a castle surrounded by gardens. They owned a farm and a forest and a vineyard. They went hunting with eccentric nobles who reminisced about the glory days of empire. They were patrons of the parish church and lived as semi-feudal lords over a stretch of picturesque countryside and its many colorful inhabitants.
Then the ground began to shift. Government control of the land was passed from the Czechs to the Hungarians, then to the Ruthenians, and then to the Hungarians again. More than once the Perényis buried their valuables and left, wondering if they’d ever return. As German influence expanded into Central Europe, their corner of the map became temporarily more stable, since Hungary was Germany’s ally. Germany had invaded Poland and was at war with France and England, but they enjoyed a summer of awkward peace at Szollos – awkward since their personal sympathies were with the Allies but they owed their reprieve to Hitler.
“Then one day when I took my afternoon walk in the garden, I heard the sound of cannon. Over the Carpathians something was happening. We had heard no sound of guns before. The war was in western Poland, not near us. This could mean only one thing. The Russians must be going in. I watched the gardener put in some special black tulip bulbs I had ordered from Pest. The white sheep dogs bounded happily around us. And the sound of cannon came again.”
It’s tempting to compare Eleanor Perényi’s book with other memoirs of the same era. It lacks the immediacy of Iris Origo’s War in Val D’Orcia and the scope and erudition of Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon or Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Between the Woods and Water. But perhaps more effectively than these others, More Was Lost records the seduction of faith in the notion that things will find their accustomed course – that the worst will not happen after all. It’s a portrait of the painful ironies and choices that may fall on those who find themselves caught in a territory (literal or metaphorical) disputed over by social forces that care nothing for individual lives.
The honeymoon on the volcano ends when pregnant Eleanor finally – at the last possible minute – leaves husband and home to find safety across the Atlantic. Before she knew it, a chapter in her own life – and in the life of the world – had closed forever.
“So it is that one passes insensibly from one part of life to another, from the past into the future. It isn’t usually as complete as that, that is the only difference. You are never given so much as a glimpse of what you will become, and perhaps it is just as well. It is not nearly as bad as being born, because you are helped by recollection. For a long time the memory of the past sustains you, and when it no longer does, you are already a different person.”
Read
April 3, 2025Amazing memoir by a woman who married a Hungarian baron just before WWII started. Perényi (born Eleanor Stone, daughter of a naval diplomat and an author) was nineteen when she met Zsiga, who was thirty-seven. They got engaged after a week, married in three months. She went to live on his estate, and settled in and got to know the place and the people; these parts reminded me, as they remind her, of Turgenev. (She literally says in the text that meeting the Hungarian nobility and seeing Zsiga’s cousins’ estates and so on is like meeting characters out of Turgenev, or Chekhov.) And then, of course, history happens, war looms for years and is finally declared, and absolutely all hell breaks loose. The memoir doesn’t end the way you would think, at all, and it made me realise how genuinely uprooting the real civilian’s experience of war is. Fiction makes us think things end up tidily one way or another. Things don’t. People lost track of each other. Eleanor and Zsiga are unable to communicate for three years, and by the time they hear from each other again, it’s too late; something in the fabric of their marriage has snapped or unravelled, they’ve lost too much and changed too much, or maybe their pre-existing differences (not least of age) became unignorable after those years of silence. More Was Lost also taught me, by osmosis, a huge amount about the complexity of territory disputes in Central and Eastern Europe. It’s not just Russia/Ukraine, and it’s been going on for literally centuries, and it’s pretty much all the fault of the Holy Roman/Austro-Hungarian Empire. I had to check a few maps and Google a few names of no-longer-extant nations; a map in the front of the book would have been incredibly useful, but you can get by with Wikipedia. Endlessly fascinating, and sad. Source: bought new with gift cards
June 29, 2024
Och, fuck. Wederom een boek of zes mee uit Boedapest, maar beter en vernietigender wordt het niet meer. Zie intro: “In the end, it seems neither wanted to leave the world where each felt secure - perhaps history had erased the only world where both could belong.”
Memoirs van Perényi, vanaf haar huwelijk tot de (fysieke) scheiding van haar Hongaarse man. Passages over Hongaars leren ook (hoewel ik nog maar een week bezig ben) al herkenbaar.
“I shall always associate Hungary with the tickle of a moustache or a beard on the hand.”
“I remember a French play - the hero complained that the pleasant things that happened to him were arranged by incompetent amateurs; it was his disasters that were handled by the experts.”
Etc, etc, och.
Gewoon een parel van de eerste tot de laatste pagina. NYRB editie - voor de rest van mijn leven te koesteren op de veiligste bovenste plank van de boekenkast.
Memoirs van Perényi, vanaf haar huwelijk tot de (fysieke) scheiding van haar Hongaarse man. Passages over Hongaars leren ook (hoewel ik nog maar een week bezig ben) al herkenbaar.
“I shall always associate Hungary with the tickle of a moustache or a beard on the hand.”
“I remember a French play - the hero complained that the pleasant things that happened to him were arranged by incompetent amateurs; it was his disasters that were handled by the experts.”
Etc, etc, och.
Gewoon een parel van de eerste tot de laatste pagina. NYRB editie - voor de rest van mijn leven te koesteren op de veiligste bovenste plank van de boekenkast.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 18, 2019
As a long-time fan of Perenyi's witty garden essays, Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden, I was excited to learn more about her. I didn't connect with the book well at first. But the last chapters were moving, where she writes about the beautiful and ordinary days of a brief respite from the war and gives a restrained account that speaks volumes on being separated from her home and husband.
February 25, 2016
I hadn't heard of this prior to joining the New York Review Books book club, but it's nice to be surprised by such an enjoyable book. I will say that I enjoyed the first half of this more than the second because the story of an American woman moving to live in a chateau in Eastern Europe in the innocent time between two World Wars was more interesting to me than the description of what happened when that second World War started.
I think the most refreshing aspect of this whole thing though is that even when Perenyi herself comes off as unintentionally pretentious at times, her writing never does. There isn't a lot of ornamentation in her writing style, in fact, it's pretty easy to imagine her simply sitting down and letting her memories flow out of her pen. It was nice to read a straightforward account of someone's life that was dramatic on its own terms, without being heightened at all by the writer themselves.
I think the most refreshing aspect of this whole thing though is that even when Perenyi herself comes off as unintentionally pretentious at times, her writing never does. There isn't a lot of ornamentation in her writing style, in fact, it's pretty easy to imagine her simply sitting down and letting her memories flow out of her pen. It was nice to read a straightforward account of someone's life that was dramatic on its own terms, without being heightened at all by the writer themselves.
December 21, 2016
A charming memoir in a winningly forthright style. What I found dizzying was the amount Eleanor managed to pack in during the few short years she spent helping her Hungarian husband Zsiga renovate and run his estate in Ruthenia, while simultaneously traveling several times to Paris and Italy to be with her parents. Eleanor fell in love with Zsiga in May 1937, and left Hungary for ever when she fell pregnant in 1940. She must have had a real gift for languages to become fluent in Hungarian in such a short time. It comes as quite a shock to learn from the introduction that after the war, Eleanor and Zsiga drifted irretrievably apart and quickly got divorced. Eleanor gives an amusing description of the way of life of the stolid landed gentry of Eastern Europe, and a moving portrait of 2 people from totally different worlds briefly united in the doomed attempt to make something of an estate situated in a hotly contested corner of the old Hapsburg Empire.
August 19, 2012
Insightful recollections of the author's short marriage to a Hungarian nobleman at the beginning of WWII as their estate is flung back and forth between warring factions placing them in Hungary, Czechlaslovakia, Ruthenia, and the Soviet Union in a few short years. Her youth and naivete as an American girl abroad is evident but it also allows for for her enthusiasm and bold spirit facing historically entrenched culture and prejudices. She wrote a marvelous gardening book Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden on planting and growing on this property which lead me to More Was Lost.
April 13, 2016
In 1937, a young American daughter-of-privilege traveling in Europe with her family meets and marries a middle-aged Hungarian baron. They go to live on the not-so-small remnants of his feudal estate in Transcarpathia. Both families are without money in their own eyes, but the baron's hundreds of acres of farmland and vineyards permit them to employ several servants and farmhands, and for the wife/author to renovate the manor house. Perhaps I sound too harsh - I thoroughly enjoyed this book - the author has a fine sense of humor, good powers of observation, and the historical context, the relations between Germany, Hungary, Russia, and Czzechoslovakia at the outset of WWII is fascinating. I am now more informed about the short-lived republic of Ruthenia than I'd ever imagined I would be.
January 8, 2017
This is a book to read at a leisurely pace until you get to the last chapters when the tension builds up as WW II approaches.
Eleanor Perenyi was an amazing woman with a sense of adventure that got her through the early years of her marriage and her becoming a mistress of a castle and its holdings. She learned Hungarian, farming, managing servants, and a very different culture and seemed to thrive doing it
Her marriage to Zsiga seemed so happy and yet it ended at the end of their separation during WW II. I want to know more about her life at that point and about her raising her son on her own. I may need to read the book that brought her fame--Garden Thoughts.
Eleanor Perenyi was an amazing woman with a sense of adventure that got her through the early years of her marriage and her becoming a mistress of a castle and its holdings. She learned Hungarian, farming, managing servants, and a very different culture and seemed to thrive doing it
Her marriage to Zsiga seemed so happy and yet it ended at the end of their separation during WW II. I want to know more about her life at that point and about her raising her son on her own. I may need to read the book that brought her fame--Garden Thoughts.
Read
July 4, 2016She was an American girl of nineteen, he was a Hungarian count of 37. They fell in love. It was 1937. History wasn't just snapping at their heels, it was about to break over them.
This is a fluent well-written, honest, and fascinating memoir.
This is a fluent well-written, honest, and fascinating memoir.
February 25, 2018
A young 19 year old marries a Hungarian nobleman in the early 20th century. She lives on their country estate, which is located on the shifting borders of the WWI/WWII era Balkan states. As their land passes from Czechslovakia to Hungary, they live on their bucolic farm/vineyard/distillery/orchard. Eleanor describes farm life and the changing seasons with lovely attention to detail.
The book veers from Good Housekeeping to Reporting World War II Vol. 1: American Journalism 1938-1944, though of course Eleanor gives ominous hints from the very beginning that it won't end well.
By being in the right time at the right place, she has a firsthand account of soldiers mobilizing in France and Hungary, and of the Polish army in retreat:
4/5 *
The book veers from Good Housekeeping to Reporting World War II Vol. 1: American Journalism 1938-1944, though of course Eleanor gives ominous hints from the very beginning that it won't end well.
By being in the right time at the right place, she has a firsthand account of soldiers mobilizing in France and Hungary, and of the Polish army in retreat:
It was a black moment. It was the first time I had ever seen an army in retreat--
and this was an Allied army... by now the road was completely clogged with vehicles. They none of them wanted to stop. They seemed possessed of a desperate haste. They didn't realize the battle was over.
4/5 *
June 10, 2025
A 19-year-old American girl has a whirlwind romance with a 37-year-old Hungarian baron, marries him and moves to his castle. She spends a few years learning Hungarian and getting to know the local area before the war shatters that life forever.
I enjoyed the earlier parts of this book and appreciated the young Eleanor's vim and enthusiasm for her new life, but I found the book became less interesting as time went on. She never seemed to mature beyond the wide-eyed ingenue, and she started to come across as quite arrogant and petty, judging people based on how good-looking they were or how well they dressed and dismissing whole people groups as 'stupid' if they disagreed with her. She creates huge drama over being forced apart from her 'darling' husband, but reading the later chapters of the book, it's pretty obvious that she was enjoying her nice, comfortable life in America (while her husband was risking his life, rescuing Jews from the Nazis) and had no intention whatsoever of swapping it for a more impoverished life with Zsiga after the war.
It's well written, but the author's smug self-centredness and self-satisfaction was annoying.
I enjoyed the earlier parts of this book and appreciated the young Eleanor's vim and enthusiasm for her new life, but I found the book became less interesting as time went on. She never seemed to mature beyond the wide-eyed ingenue, and she started to come across as quite arrogant and petty, judging people based on how good-looking they were or how well they dressed and dismissing whole people groups as 'stupid' if they disagreed with her. She creates huge drama over being forced apart from her 'darling' husband, but reading the later chapters of the book, it's pretty obvious that she was enjoying her nice, comfortable life in America (while her husband was risking his life, rescuing Jews from the Nazis) and had no intention whatsoever of swapping it for a more impoverished life with Zsiga after the war.
It's well written, but the author's smug self-centredness and self-satisfaction was annoying.
October 8, 2025
Super interesting memoir for lovers of Central/Eastern Europe…. I picked it up randomly at a used bookstore and at the beginning I kept thinking, “This happens to be such a good companion to the Eastern European history book I’ve been reading” [Goodbye Eastern Europe by Jacob Mikanowski] b/c of its similar descriptions of traditional Hungarian country life, interactions between ethnic groups, shifting borders, plus the truly bizarre concept of “house Jews” which I’d otherwise only ever heard about through Mikanowski. Then I realized about halfway through reading Perenyi’s book that Mikanowski actually used it as direct quoted source material for his! Even though this was a total coincidence, I’d recommend pairing these two books together — I feel like I got a lot more out of each one by reading them side-by-side.
December 29, 2023
The book wasn’t as compelling as I’d expected. There are a few good anecdotes as Perényi gets acclimated to her husband’s 750-acre baronial estate in pre-WWII Ruthenia, but her struggles at the war’s onset were more inconvenient than terrifying (she spends part of early 1940 with her parents in Paris, feeding the family cat “nothing but the best sirloin”). She was back in the U.S. in the summer of 1940, shortly after being caught in rounds of RAF bombing of Genoa, Italy (okay, that’s terrifying, but it didn’t seem so much to her). Lastly, good luck keeping track of the ever-changing political control of the city of Szöllös, including Hungarian, Czech, Ruthenian, Nazi German, or Russian (the city, in 2023, is named Vynohradiv, now in Ukraine.)
December 10, 2017
This is a very interesting and very readable memoir by a young American woman who marries a poor Hungarian count in the years between the World Wars. It's her story, but there is much more to it- some history, geography, culture, etc. It helps to have a little knowledge about the breakup of Austria-Hungary after WW1. One thing that struck me reading it is how the West so badly botched the Treaty of Trianon(with Austria Hungary, as wel as the Treaty of Versailles with Germany) that World War 2 was all but inevitable. I have ready many history books coverig these events but this eas an excellent first-person, "microview". Very well done.
May 17, 2023
I am loving reading these NYRB editions of little known classics by women. More Was Lost is a great companion read to Iris Origo's wartime diaries in Italy. Eleanor is a pampered American 19yo who married a Hungarian baron twice her age, then goes to live in his castle...until WWII rumbles into existence. She lived in Ruthenia, which is now Ukraine. This fairy-tale interlude is all the more gripping for the abrupt turn it takes at the end. Young Eleanor was naive and and not aware of her privilege, yet still manages to convey a moment in history that is both quite particular and yet loaded with meaning for many. Don't read the Intro first; spoilers!
January 12, 2023
This is a beautiful memoir of the lost world that was pre-WW2 Central/Eastern Europe. Eleanor Perenyi is a masterful writer and storyteller and her journey from all-American girl to Eastern European gentry is enthralling. This novel is anthropologically fascinating and Eleanor's story, because we know how doomed she is through the clear eyes of hindsight, is tragic and yet so beautiful. Even though we all know what the end result of her story is, I still found myself hoping it would end differently.
Perenyi's writing is clear and concise and her vignettes of Eastern Europe country life are both entertaining and somehow profound. I loved seeing this world through her eyes. I just hate we never really know what happened between her and Zsiga, but that story was not meant for us.
Perenyi's writing is clear and concise and her vignettes of Eastern Europe country life are both entertaining and somehow profound. I loved seeing this world through her eyes. I just hate we never really know what happened between her and Zsiga, but that story was not meant for us.
April 10, 2018
Fascinating memoir of newly married young American woman on country estate on Hungarian/Ukrainian/Czech border from 1938-1941. The Pereni-Park is now in Vinograd, Ukraine and has apparently been turned into a run-down teachers college.
A neighboring estate owner has his own time-zone (30 mins different to Hungarian time) to ensure more daylight for farming on his estate !
A neighboring estate owner has his own time-zone (30 mins different to Hungarian time) to ensure more daylight for farming on his estate !
October 24, 2021
A wonderful memoir. Perenyi's voice is cool and self-aware, never cloying, but her story--falling in love with and marrying a Hungarian count and going home with him to restore his ancestral castle--is like a fairy tale. Except that it happens in 1937 and history is not on her side.
September 2, 2024
Bought serendipitously and on a whim from the Book House in Kent, CT, this was a slight but amusing memoir of an American in Central Europe on the eve of WWIi. It did a great job of evoking the particular place and time
October 29, 2017
3.5 stars
June 19, 2018
Many wonderful moments and a refreshingly Mitford-esque take on a conflict often rendered with an all too obligatory piety that can sometimes drain the vitality from history.
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