One Pair of Hands
10 best books like One Pair of Hands (Monica Dickens): Wild Strawberries, One Fine Day, Henrietta's War: News from the Home Front 1939-1942, Anybody Can Do Anything, The Provincial Lady in Wartime, The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, Few Eggs and No Oranges: The Diaries of Vere Hodgson 1940-45, Down the Garden Path, A Vicarage family: A biography of myself, A London Child of the 1870s
| Author | Angela Thirkell |
| ISBN | 1559213248 |
Action in Thirkells second Barsetshire novel centres around the extended family of the Leslies of Rushwater House. Lady Emily reigns behind a self-generated thicket of confusion and turmoil. There is no event so settled that Lady Emily cannot throw it into chaos at the last moment. Mr Leslie has been...
| Author | Mollie Panter-Downes |
It's a summer's day in 1946. The English village of Wealding is no longer troubled by distant sirens, yet the rustling coils of barbed wire are a reminder that something, some quality of life, has evaporated. Together again after years of separation, Laura and Stephen Marshall and their daughter Victoria...
| Author | Joyce Dennys |
| ISBN | 1408802813 |
Spirited Henrietta wishes she was the kind of doctor's wife who knew exactly how to deal with the daily upheavals of war. But then, everyone in her close-knit Devonshire village seems to find different ways to cope: there's the indomitable Lady B, who writes to Hitler every night to tell him precisely...
| Author | Betty MacDonald |
| ISBN | 0704102439 |
One would suppose that during the Depression there wasn't much to laugh about in America. But one would be wrong. This book takes up Betty's story before she'd had any success as a writer - when she went back to live with her mother. With a failed chicken farm and marriage behind her, Betty was desperate...
| Author | E.M. Delafield |
| ISBN | 0897332105 |
These highly acclaimed, delightful novels are written in diary form by the Provincial Lady, who lives in a country house with her husband, two children, the children's French governess, Cook and a few assorted helpers. The era of the 1930s is wittily and shrewdly recreated with amusing illustrations.World...
| Author | Charlotte Mosley |
| ISBN | 0395740150 |
Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, two of the twentieth century's most amusing and gifted writers, matched wits and exchanged insults in more than five hundred letters, a continuous irreverent dialogue that stretched for twenty-two years. Their delicious correspondence, much of it never published...
| Author | Vere Hodgson |
| ISBN | 0953478084 |
Vere Hodgson worked for a Notting Hill Gate charity during the Second World War ; being sparky and unflappable, she was not going to let Hitler make a difference to her life, but the beginning of the Blitz did, which is why she began her published diaries on 25 June 1940: 'Last night at about 1 a.m. we had the...
| Author | Beverley Nichols |
| ISBN | 0881927104 |
Rating Clarification: 4.5 Stars
This is one of those books that would have forever remained hidden from my reading world without the auspices of Goodreads in general and my GR buddy Leslie in particular (to Leslie - thanks for your squee-worthy review which led me to read this).
Written...
A Vicarage family: A biography of myself
| Author | Noel Streatfeild |
| ISBN | 0006712290 |
A Vicarage Family is the first part in a fictionalized autobiography in which Noel Streatfeild tells the story of her own childhood, painting a poignant and vivid picture of daily life in an impoverished, genteel family in the years leading up to the First World War.In the story there are three little...
A London Child of the 1870s
| Author | Molly Hughes |
| ISBN | 1903155517 |
The first in a series of three memoirs. Molly Hughes writes of her suburban London Victorian family in the 1870s. In this first book she describes her happy childhood, growing up with her 4 brothers. She describes outings in London and holidays with her mother's family in Cornwall. Hughes notes details...
| Author | Gwen Raverat |
| ISBN | 0472064754 |
At the close of 1952, Bettrand Russell wrote to Gwen Raverat that he had been reading Period Piece “with the very greatest delight.” Raverat’s memories of childhood and coming of age during the final years of Victoria’s reign capture a young woman’s impressions of dons, eccentrics, and...
| Author | D.E. Stevenson |
| ISBN | 0030014360 |
Tenth May, 1934. At this moment I look up and see the Man Who Lives Next Door standing on his doorstep watching my antics, and disapproving (I feel sure) of my flowered silk dressing gown. Probably his own wife wears one of red flannel, and most certainly has never been seen leaning out of the window in it...
| Author | Margaret Powell |
| ISBN | 0330028677 |
From the grand houses of Brighton to imposing London mansions, life as a kitchen maid could be exhausting and demoralising. It’s not just being at the beck and call of the people upstairs, when even the children of the family can treat you like dirt, but having to deal with temperamental cooks, starchy...
To War with Whitaker: The Wartime Diaries of the Countess of Ranfurly, 1939-1945
| Author | Hermione Ranfurly |
| ISBN | 0749319542 |
In September 1939, the young Lord and Lady Ranfurly's idyllic holiday in Scotland was brought to a premature end when war broke out. Dan Ranfurly, with his faithful valet Whitaker, were sent to North Africa. When her husband was taken prisoner, his wife bluffed her way to the Middle East and stayed there,...
The Forbidden Zone: A Nurse's Impressions of the First World War
| Author | Mary Borden |
| ISBN | 1843914433 |
Mary Borden worked for four years in an evacuation hospital unit following the front lines up and down the European theater of the First World War. This beautifully written book, to be read alongside the likes of Sassoon, Graves, and Remarque, is a collection of her memories and impressions of that experience....
| Author | Helene Hanff |
| ISBN | 0918825733 |
A celebration of her life-long love for New York, Hanff embarked on this project as an assignment, and realized she had not been to many of the main tourist attractions- the Statue of Liberty, Wall Street, the World Trade Center. As make-believe tourists, off she and Patsy travel to describe the Metropolitan...
| Author | Elizabeth von Arnim |
| ISBN | 1853815535 |
This delightful companion to the famous Elizabeth and Her German Garden is a witty, lyrical account of a rejuvenating summer. Descriptions of magnificent larkspurs and burning nasturtiums give way to those of cooling forest walks, and of clambering up the mud bank when the miller is not in view. Rainy...
Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
| Author | Julia Strachey |
| ISBN | 1903155274 |
This was absolute rubbish. Wicked too. The story was that although her wedding was but a few hours off, the bride couldn't make up her mind whether she should get married or run off with a previous lover, a dithering sort of person whose job took him on great adventures abroad. He had just turned up again...
| Author | Andrea Lee |
| ISBN | 0812976657 |
At age twenty-five, Andrea Lee joined her husband, a Harvard doctoral candidate in Russian history, for his eight months’ study at Moscow State University and an additional two months in Leningrad. Published to enormous critical acclaim in 1981, Russian Journal is the award-winning author’s...
This was ghost written, but nevertheless written in an authentic voice, helped perhaps by Rose's vehemence and lusty use of swearing. It's written in the first person, and I suspect large parts of it were dictated by Rose herself.
She was born in the East End of London, and worked as a house maid...
