Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #978495 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-23
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

Synopsis
Autobiography of Ursula Vaughan Williams who also wrote as Ursula Wood. She is an author, poet, and librettist, whose work was set to music by a number of composers, including her husband, Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Customer Reviews

A footnote to the career of a great composer
Before she married her second husband, Ursula Wood was a published poet who had devised programmes for the BBC. This autobiography, written but not published in 1972, the centenary of Ralph Vaughan Williams' birth, shows some signs of being an attempt to reclaim that independent existence before she became, in her own words, "a fragment of the True Cross being bandied about". In this it is only partly successful, and the fact that it has now been published by the Vaughan Williams Society is itself a demonstration that it is only likely to be of interest to devotees of her husband's music. Certainly the early pages are remarkable chiefly for showing the pitifully limited options open to an intelligent middle-class woman in the first half of the twentieth century. Things liven up a bit, as they did for so many women, when we get to the Second World War, but the book only really takes wing when her life becomes entwined with the composer's.
It has to be said that the VW Society has not exactly done its president proud in its treatment of her memoirs. The presentation is amateurish (the book appears to have been typeset on Microsoft Word) and the editor has cluttered the text with ludicrous and redundant footnotes which risk making a joke of the whole enterprise. This is a shame: the book is full of the poetic vignettes and drily humorous anecdotes which made Ursula's biography of her husband such a classic, and is certainly worth the time of anyone who has enjoyed the earlier book.