Four French Holidays Av Anne Hall

<p>Four popular novelists of the same generation each wrote a novel inspired by a holiday that the author spent in France. In the nineteen-fifties, Rumer Godden based <em>The Greengage Summer</em> on her recollections of her family¿s 1923 battlefield-tour manqu¿n the Champagne region. Margery Sharp¿s 1936 holiday in Southern France led to ¿Still Waters¿ and <em>The Nutmeg Tree</em>: 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 novel <em>The Scapegoat</em> was 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 reflected in <em>The Snow-Woman</em>, in which a similar holiday leads a never-married septuagenarian to experience a renaissance of sorts.</p>