Wait For Me!: Memoirs of the Youngest Mitford Sister

Description

Deborah Devonshire is a natural writer with a knack for the telling phrase and for hitting the nail on the head. She tells the story of her upbringing, lovingly and wittily describing her parents (so memorably fictionalised by her sister Nancy); she talks candidly about her brother and sisters, and their politics (while not being at all political herself), finally setting the record straight. Throughout the book she writes brilliantly about the country and her deep attachment to it and those who live and work in it. As Duchess of Devonshire, Debo played an active role in restoring and overseeing the day-to-day running of the family houses and gardens, and in developing commercial enterprises at Chatsworth. She tells poignantly of the deaths of three of her children, as well as her husband's battle with alcohol addiction. Wait For Me is enthralling and a total joy, full of the author's sympathetic wit (which she is not afraid to use on herself).

The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire was brought up in Oxfordshire. In 1950 her husband Andrew, the 11th Duke of Devonshire, inherited estates in Yorkshire and Ireland as well as Chatsworth, the family seat in Derbyshire, and Deborah became chatelaine and housekeeper of one of England's greatest and best-loved houses. Following her husband's death in 2004, she moved to a village on the Chatsworth estate where she now lives.

A touching, funny memorial to a vanished age - Stephen Moss, Guardian I was captivated . . . unputdownable - Bel Mooney, Daily Mail The Duchess is an exhilarating writer, with a great gift for storytelling, and a prose style of elegant simplicity - Jane Shilling, Evening Standard Wait For Me! proves irresistible, even for die-hard Mitphobes like me - Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday Funny and sad, the irresistible combination that is one of the secrets of charm - Daily Telegraph She [Debo] is in possession of what I can only describe as a uniquely Mitford-esque sensibility; loving but unsentimental; devoid of self-pity; unwilling to bore others with her own travails; able to find the ridiculous in almost anything . . . these qualities - disarmingly rare in Oprahworld - are , to me, indisputably admirable - Observer An entertaining, lively portrait - Scotsman The one book this year that everyone will want in their Christmas stocking - A. N. Wilson, Spectator