Yesterday Morning - Reviews - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Sept, 2002

Yesterday Morning. Diana Athill. Granta Books. [pounds sterling]12.99. 168 pages. ISBN 1-86207-484-4. This is the fourth volume of memoirs by the writer and editor whose most recent recollections, Stet -- An Editor's Life, was highly praised. In this fourth volume Miss Athill goes back to her childhood in the 1920s and she vividly recreates an England that has long vanished.

There is necessarily a great deal about her family life, religion, sexual awakenings, school, religious faith, parental discords and falling in love. The most important influence in her childhood seems to have been her mother. Now an elderly woman herself she sees that her childhood 'rises up to meet me -- or rather, even when I thought I was far away from it, it was always there, and now I have come back to it'. There is a bitter-sweet nostalgia about the book which makes it a welcome companion to the others by this author.