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The Durrells

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chessington | 14:21 Mon 13th May 2019 | Film, Media & TV
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What an excellent episode, just so sad it has come to an end
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They are showing a programme next week where Keeley Hawes reveals what happened to them all after they left Corfu.
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I know, hope to watch it, thank you
The Bitter Lemons of Cyprus is a good read by Laurence Durrell. Period 1953-1956 in Cyprus.
In the last episode he mentioned he would be staying on Corfu as a secret agent. He did not appear to be joking.
This is a new revelation to me. Larry Durrell and his wife ,Nancy, was not mentioned in the TV series.
Apparenty Larry was married in 1935 to Nancy and persuaded his mother and younger siblings to move to Corfu to escape England and the weather.


//First marriage and Durrell's move to Corfu[edit]

On 22 January 1935, Durrell married Nancy Isobel Myers (1912–1983). It was the first of his four marriages.[4] Durrell was always unhappy in England, and in March of that year he persuaded his new wife, and his mother and younger siblings, to move to the Greek island of Corfu. There they could live more economically and escape both the English weather, and what Durrell considered the stultifying English culture, which he described as "the English death".[5]

That same year Durrell's first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, was published by Cassell. Around this time he chanced upon a copy of Henry Miller's 1934 novel Tropic of Cancer.[6] After reading it, he wrote to Miller, expressing intense admiration for his novel. Durrell's letter sparked an enduring friendship[6] and mutually critical relationship that spanned 45 years. Durrell's next novel, Panic Spring, was strongly influenced by Miller's work,[7] while his 1938 novel The Black Book abounded with "four-letter words... grotesques,... [and] its mood equally as apocalyptic" as Tropic.[7]

In Corfu, Lawrence and Nancy lived together in bohemian style. For the first few months, the couple lived with the rest of the Durrell family in the Villa Anemoyanni at Kontokali. In early 1936, Durrell and Nancy moved to the White House, a fisherman's cottage on the shore of Corfu's northeastern coast at Kalami, then a tiny fishing village. Durrell's friend Theodore Stephanides, a Greek doctor, scientist, and poet, was a frequent guest, and Miller stayed at the "White House" in 1939.

Durrell fictionalised this period of his sojourn on Corfu in the lyrical novel Prospero's Cell. His younger brother Gerald Durrell, who became a naturalist, published his own version in his memoir My Family and Other Animals (1954) and in the following two books of Gerald's so-called Corfu Trilogy, published in 1969 and 1978 respectively. Gerald describes Lawrence as living permanently with his mother and siblings—his wife Nancy is not mentioned at all. Lawrence, in his turn, refers only briefly to his brother Leslie, and he does not mention that his mother and two other siblings were also living on Corfu in those years. The accounts cover a few of the same topics; for example, both Gerald and Lawrence describe the roles played in their lives by the Corfiot taxi driver Spiro Hakiaopulos and Theodore Stephanides. In Corfu, Lawrence became friends with Marie Aspioti, with whom he cooperated in the publication of Lear's Corfu.[8]:260 //
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thank you I will look out for the novels

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