Wine of Honour

by Barbara Beauchamp

Overview

I wonder how many women today are back in their pre-war ruts. For how many was the war merely a temporary disarrangement and for how many others has it meant complete re-adjustment, an entirely new set of circumstances? This is a stupid thought for me to have when, even in my own case, I don't know the answer.

Helen Townsend and neighbour Laura Watson are unlikely friends as a result of serving together in the ATS. Helen is married to the local doctor, but has spent much of the war with her lover Brian, and both men are now due back from active service. Laura, stuck caring for her domineering father, is already missing the freedoms that war offered. They and many others in their village are just beginning to adjust to the unexpected challenges of peace.

In Wine of Honour, Barbara Beauchamp seems somehow to have recognized how unique and fleeting were the details of life in the days and weeks just after the end of World War II, and to have set out to carefully document them--with particular focus on the experiences of women. The result is an incomparable, fly-on-the-wall vision of a fascinating time and place.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781913054335
Publisher:	Dean Street Press
Publication date:	08/05/2019
Pages:	218
Product dimensions:	5.06(w) x 7.81(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Barbara Proctor Beauchamp was born in 1909, and brought up in France and Switzerland. She had a younger brother and sister, twins, who both died in early adulthood.
Before World War Two Barbara Beauchamp was a freelance journalist and the author of three novels. In 1939, living in London, she joined the ATS, and Wine of Honour (1945) was her first novel since the outbreak of war.
After the war she continued to live in London, with her partner Norah C. James, a fellow novelist. In later life she shared a house with Millicent Dewar, a renowned psychoanalyst.
Barbara Beauchamp wrote three further novels after Wine of Honour, the last published in 1958. She died in London in 1974.