Book description
In spring 1956, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire - youngest of the six
legendary Mitford sisters - invited the writer and war hero Patrick
Leigh Fermor to visit Lismore Castle, the Devonshires' house in Ireland.
This halcyon visit sparked off a deep friendship and a lifelong exchange
of sporadic but highly entertaining letters. There can rarely have been
such contrasting styles: Debo, unashamed philistine and self-professed
illiterate (though suspected by her friends of being a secret reader),
darts from subject to subject while Paddy, polyglot, widely read prose
virtuoso, replies in the fluent, polished manner that has earned him
recognition as one of the finest writers in the English language. Prose
notwithstanding, the two friends have much in common: a huge enjoyment
of life, youthful high spirits, warmth, generosity and lack of malice.
There are glimpses of President Kennedy's inauguration, weekends at
Sandringham, stag hunting in France, filming with Errol Flynn in French
Equatorial Africa and, above all, of life at Chatsworth, the great house
that Debo spent much of her life restoring, and of Paddy in the house
that he and his wife Joan designed and built on the southernmost
peninsula of Greece. The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire was brought up
in Oxfordshire with spells in London. In 1950, her husband, Andrew, the
11th Duke of Devonshire, inherited estates in Yorkshire and 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. Patrick Leigh Fermor now lives in
Greece in a house he designed and built.
