Yesterday Morning

Diana Athill has written three memoirs which have been acclaimed as classics for their insight, candor and wit: Instead of a Letter, After a Funeral, and Stet: An Editor's Life. Here she goes back to the beginning, in a sharp evocation of a childhood unfashionably filled with happiness—a Norfolk country house, servants, the pleasures of horses, the unfolding secrets of adults and sex. This is England in the 1920s, seen from the vantage point of England in 2001. It was a privileged and loving life: but did it make her happy?