Strangers

by Emma Tennant

British novelist Tennant tells stories about her wealthy and eccentric family. Among them are her great-aunt Margot Asquith, married to the Prime Minister, her reclusive uncle Stephan, and her half-brother Colin who built a palace in the Caribbean. She includes no index or bibliography, but does provide a family tree. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Genres: Biography, Memoir, Nonfiction

183 pages, Hardcover

First published June 22, 1999

About the author

Since the early 1970s, when she was in her mid-thirties, Emma Tennant has been a prolific novelist and has established herself as one of the leading British exponents of "new fiction." This does not mean that she is an imitator of either the French nouveaux romanciers or the American post-modernists, although her work reveals an indebtedness to the methods and preoccupations of some of the latter. Like them, she employs parody and rewriting, is interested in the fictiveness of fiction, appropriates some science-fiction conventions, and exploits the possibilities of generic dislocation and mutation, especially the blending of realism and fantasy. Yet, although parallels can be cited and influences suggested, her work is strongly individual, the product of an intensely personal, even idiosyncratic, attempt to create an original type of highly imaginative fiction.

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Prolific, once critically-acclaimed, Scottish author and editor Emma Tennant’s eccentric, episodic examination of her famous family: chiefly her great-grandmother one of the renowned Wyndham sisters, her uncle Stephen Tennant the epitome of the ‘bright, young, thing’, and great-aunt Margot unhappily married to one-time Prime Minister Asquith. Tennant herself only appears halfway through her fictionalised chronicle, as a young girl struggling to comprehend her relatives’ hushed conversations about the past: the whispers of secrets, lost loves, women married off for money and mothers consumed by grief.

Tennant’s book opens in 1912 at a gracious, Edwardian, house party where a seemingly-untouchable family celebrate their wealth and their glorious, slightly bohemian connections. But then, as war breaks out, cracks begin to appear. Margot’s marriage to Asquith is marred by his affair with her step-daughter’s friend Venetia. Tennant’s great-grandmother is undone by the death of her beloved son ‘Bim’ at the Somme, and the house is rapidly taken over by an obsession with spiritualism and the unknown, seances and talk of worlds beyond. Pamela snatches and adopts a young child from the local village as a substitute for her own lost child. And all the while the servants, headed up by the stoical Louisa and the indomitable Nanny Trusler, look on bemusedly.

Tennant then flashes forward to WW2 when as a small child she’s been tidied away with her nanny May, and the aging Louisa, to a crumbling, isolated and freezing Scottish castle. Surrounded by sparkling, family portraits she comes to know her long-lost relatives but can’t recognise her own parents when they finally reappear. Tennant’s piece reads like a novel, frequently evocative and atmospheric, carefully-imagined, through it she provides glimpses of the glittering circles her family travelled in; their connections to writers like Rosamond Lehmann, Rupert Brooke, L. P. Hartley, as well as their links to Princess Margaret and hints of possible royal scandal. Although the fragmented structure doesn’t quite come together, it’s a fascinating look at a lost world.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating first volume (of 4 I think) of autobiography by the British novelist Tennant.Interesting insights into the aristocratic life style in England in the early part of the 20th century.Her grandmother's sister was Margot who was married to H.H. Asquith, British prime minister at the time.All in all, an interesting book about a fairly eccentric family.

[Dzsmith · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was interested in the family history of this book but was very put off by the long convoluted sentences.

[Flora · Rating 2 out of 5]

A strange, fragmented sort of memoir, sort of family portrait. I really read this because I wanted to read more about Stephen Tennant, one of the brightest of Bright Young Things, lover of Siegfried Sassoon, inspiration for Lord Sebastian Flyte. I didn't really get that though: Stephen is there but really only as a kind of absurd ghost in the shadows, off being sickly with Nanny when younger, cloistered away with baubles and trinkets when older.

The second half, which focuses on the author's childhood at Glen, was kind of interesting to me because I grew up in the area and was vaguely aware of the "Big House". But over all the book is too scattered to really come together and mostly served as a reminder that there really is only about seven big families in Britain, who all seem to be related to each other in some way.

[Caroline Mcphail-Lambert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange stories about even stranger people. The parts that were great kept me plowing through the parts that were not so great.

[Yooperprof · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting, short "family memoir" by this contemporary oft-married British novelist (b. 1937). Tennant is a member of a prominent literary and political "faux-aristocratic" Scottish family with plenty of eccentricity in its gene pool.

I'm not sure what to make of Tennant's peculiar prose style. Perhaps it is elegantly opaque, or maybe she just needs a good editor.

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 3/4 stars