Images and Shadows - Part of a Life, by Iris Origo, John Murray, 278pp, £20 in UK.
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There is a direct link between Iris Origo, who died 10 years ago, and Edith Wharton. Wharton moved in the same Old New York society as Origo's father, Bayard Cutting, and paid a generous written tribute to him when he died of tuberculosis in Egypt in 1909.
By then Iris was a well-travelled seven-year-old. One of her father's last wishes was that Iris, who was Anglo-Irish (or English, as she calls it) on her mother, Lady Sybil Cuffe's side, should grow up free from all this national feeling "which makes people so unhappy. Bring her up somewhere where she doesn't belong, then she can't have it."
Origo describes pre-war summers at her American grandparents' impeccable Long Island estate, Westbrook, and contrasts this with the more easy-going ways at Desart Court in County Kilkenny, the home of her maternal grandparents. Her relationship with her grandfather, Hamilton Cuffe, Earl of Desart, was one of the most important in her life. From her childhood onwards, he wrote to Iris as if she were a contemporary, giving his views on politics, including his support for Home Rule. He never returned to Ireland after Desart was burnt down in 1922.
Eventually Iris and Lady Sybil settled in Florence, where Sybil set about restoring the Villa Medici at Fiesole. The choice of Florence was as much dictated by Lady Sybil's enjoyment of Italian art and architecture as by Bayard Cutting's concern for the future of his only child. Sybil was enthralled by her restoration projects, her travels and her neighbour Bernard Berenson's household, leaving Iris to a series of governesses. To the embarrassment of her painfully self-conscious daughter, Sybil travelled in high Edwardian style, accompanied on the train by a bevy of servants and stacks of paraphernalia. Car travel held different hazards, with Sybil driving up uninvited to villas she wished to visit, and bullying the bewildered owners into showing her around.
The best thing Sybil did for her daughter was to take up Berenson's suggestion of a classical education. Iris was an outstanding student, and would rather have gone to Oxford than spend three years making her social debut - in Florence, then London and New York.
But in fact, when it came to her biographies - which included a life of Leopardi, and a life of Byron's mistress Teresa Guiccioli - her unusual education was probably more useful than a conventional one. Her connections gave her access to private archives that had been refused to others, while her upbringing gave her a privileged insight into Italian society that a visiting scholar would never have gained.
She started writing at 35. By then she had been married for 14 years to Antonio Origo. Together they were restoring La Foce, a Tuscan estate of 3,500 acres in the Val d'Orcia. She wrote initially as a distraction from her grief at the death from tubercular meningitis of her seven-year-old son, but quickly discovered writing was her true vocation. In addition to the biographies, her memoir, War in the Val d'Orcia, is considered a classic of its kind.
Images and Shadows was first published in 1970. She writes vividly about her childhood, and with passion about her love of reading and scholarship. But she is extremely discreet about her considerable personal wealth, her marriage, her children and her adult life. Once she leaves home at 21 to marry, there is no more gossip, no famous names, no glamorous parties, only work on the vast estate and on her books. She is a model of reticence, but the reader is left wanting more. Perhaps a reissue of War in the Val d'Orcia would fill the gap.
Alannah Hopkin is a writer and critic
