Four French Holidays

Four popular novelists of the same generation each wrote a novel inspired by a holiday that the author spent in France. In the nineteen-fift ies, Rumer Godden basedThe Greengage Summeron her recollections of her family's 1923 battlefield- tour manqué in the Champagne region. Margery Sharp's 1936 holiday in Southern France led toStill WatersandThe Nutmeg Tree: both the short story and the novel are set in and around the region of Aix-les-Bains. In 1955, Daphne du Maurier first visited the department of Sarthe to research French family history; the novelThe Scapegoatwas the immediate result of the holiday. And in 1966, Stella Gibbons' last trip to the continent took the form of a visit to an old friend in her summer home near Grenoble. The stay is obliquely refl ected in The Snow-Woman, in which a similar holiday leads a never-married septuagenarian to experience a renaissance of sorts.