Amateurs in Eden: The Story of a Bohemian Marriage, Nancy and Lawrence Durrell. By Joanna Hodgkin.

Given Greece's economic woes and role as yet another Mediterranean holiday destination, it is hard to appreciate the freedom, sunlight and sense of space that it provided 50 or more years ago. Intrepid travellers would come to explore ruins and ancient villages in solitary peace, and sleep under the stars on empty sandy beaches. The islands were especially enticing, and no books contributed more to their image as a paradise than those by the Durrell brothers,Lawrence and Gerald. “Prospero's Cell” (1945), Lawrence's diary of life on Corfu, and “My Family and Other Animals” (1956), Gerald's account of his experiences as a child there, are brilliant, contrasting views of life on this Greek island in the 1930s, and remain popular to this day.

“Amateurs in Eden” is written by Joanna Hodgkin, the daughter (from a later marriage) of Lawrence Durrell's first wife Nancy. It tells Nancy's story, complete with a full description of her “unsatisfactory parents” and unhappy childhood, and an account of her life after she left Lawrence. The heart of the book, and the subject of greatest interest, is a portrait of their marriage and their four seemingly idyllic years on Corfu. They met in bohemian London when she was an art student and he was working for an estate agent and writing poetry.From the start they were a striking but “odd couple”. She was tall, willowy, beautiful. He was three inches shorter and stocky; his lack of height a “secret sorrow”. Yet he had no shortage of charm. He could turn a mundane event into a colourful drama, and she fell under his spell. After two years together, both 22, they married and left England—“Pudding Island”, according to Durrell. His widowed mother and her three younger children (including Gerald) soon followed them to Greece.

Their time in Corfu was mainly one of simple happiness: isolated, primitive, strangely serene, removed from the wider reality of international events. Many years later Durrell said: “I shall really never, never ever forget a youth spent there, discovered by accident. It was pure gold.” They swam and sailed and he, finding his voice as a writer, completed his first major novel, “The Black Book”.

Yet Lawrence and Nancy were complicated characters, and the marriage had its problems. Lawrence could be cruel and obsessively jealous, and would use words “to lacerate and destroy”. The strains were evident when they met Henry Miller in Paris in 1937. Superficially, the visit was a success. But Lawrence, who was inclined to build “a wall of ice” to separate intimates from other people, was determined to keep Nancy on the sidelines—“decorative but insignificant”—and Nancy retreated into silence.Back in Corfu there were times of “rare and precious content”, but the onset of war changed things for ever. They moved to mainland Greece and in 1941 fled to Egypt. With Cairo under threat, Nancy travelled with their one-year-old child to Jerusalem; Lawrence was unable to persuade her to return to him. He would marry three more times. Nancy eventually had over 30 years of “loving closeness” with Teddy Hodgkin.

Ms Hodgkin understandably takes her mother's side, but she is at pains to stress that there are many ways to tell the story of a marriage. Despite some misprints, incorrect dates and verbal infelicities, her account is of interest. Many will agree that Durrell's best work is infused with his love of Greece, and that his poetry deserves to be better known. The critical acclaim that greeted the novels of “The Alexandria Quartet” may have been a bit excessive in the 1950s and early 1960s, but these books deserve more readers now.