Incorporates rewritten sections of A Farm in Normandy 1941, The Incredible City 1942 and The Siege of London 1946, with a new section ‘The Days of Peace’.
Reissued text unchanged by Dent 1960, as Madeleine Young Wife.
Included in the official canon, glossed ‘(war and peace on her farm in Normandy)’.
Seventh item in ‘Mrs Robert Henrey’s autobiographical sequence in chronological order’.
Reviewed Tatler, November 23 1960, p. 43.
Madeleine—Young Wife: The Autobiography of a French Girl ran to 380 pp. Demy 8vo (c. 141K words) with a jacket showing a fanciful vue cavalière of the farmhouse in watercolours, which was changed for the Dent reissue to feature the authoress herself in front of the farm. The omnibus had four constituent parts. Chapters one to fourteen contained the complete text of the 1952 rewrite of A Farm in Normandy. Chapters fifteen and sixteen headed ‘London Interlude’ contained a new selection of rewritten extracts from A Village in Piccadilly in which ‘we’ became ‘I’, ‘ours’ became ‘my’ etc. Chapters seventeen to twenty-four contained the complete 1952 rewrite of The Return to the Farm. The final chapters twenty-five to thirty headed ‘The Days of Peace’ contained an entirely new text beginning when ‘I’ returns to ‘my farm’ in 1945 and ending at Christmas 1951 spent by ‘I’ at ‘my farm’ with ‘my son’, ‘my mother’ and for once ‘my husband’.