Lillian Beckwith (1916–2004)
Author of The Hills Is Lonely
About the Author
Series
Works by Lillian Beckwith
Reader's Digest 4 in 1 A Shine of Rainbows etc. (Need Other Titles) — Author — 1 copy
Associated Works
Reader's Digest Condensed Books 1984 v03: Skyscraper / A Shine of Rainbows / The Reckoning / Lady Washington (1984) 37 copies
Reader's Digest Condensed Books 1977 v01: Mrs. Pollifax on Safari / The R Document / Home Before Dark / The Glory Boys / The Spuddy (1977) — Contributor — 28 copies
Reader's Digest Condensed Books: Tara Kane / Elephant Bill / The Brendan Voyage / A Stranger is Watching / The Spuddy (1978) — Author — 6 copies
Het Beste Boek 161: De koning van het meer / Een tweede kans / De genadeloze nacht / Parels voor Anna — Author — 3 copies, 1 review
Reader's Digest Condensed Books: A Shine of Rainbows • The Captain's Return • Godplayer • Journey Home • Winter of the White Seal (1984) — Author — 3 copies
Livros Condensados: Aguía No Céu | Vierama Para Sempre | Dois Amigos | A Incrível Mrs. Pollifax — Contributor — 3 copies
Reader's Digest Condensed Books V. 65: The Wine and the Music / Waiting for Willa / Incredible Island / Duel in the Snow (1970) — Author — 3 copies
Het Beste Boek 119: Wedloop met de witte dood / Door een noodlottig ongeval... / Laat de bloemen leven / Een regenboog in de mist (1985) 2 copies, 1 review
Bastiaan; De god met de groene ogen; Zo trots als een pauw; Snuffel (1977) — Author — 1 copy, 1 review
RDCBLP v045 Murder and the First Lady | The Boy Who Drew Cats | A Shine of Rainbows | The Overcoat 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Beckwith, Lillian
- Legal name
- Comber, Lillian LLoyd
- Birthdate
- 1916
- Date of death
- 2004-01-03
- Gender
- female
- Occupations
- novelist
- Organizations
- World Wildlife Fund
Peel Pantomaniacs - Short biography
- Mrs Comber – who wrote under the name Lillian Beckwith – lived in Kirk Michael with her husband Ted and was famous for writing novels based on her life in the Hebrides.
Her daughter Betty Hopson, who lives in Ballaugh, said her mother was born Lillian Lloyd, in Cheshire, in 1916. She married Ted Comber in 1937 and the couple moved to the Isle of Skye in 1942. 'They bought a croft and her books were based on hers and Ted's experiences while living there. The Hills Is Lonely was published in October, 1959.'
The family moved to the Isle of Man in 1962. When she came here in the 1960s, she and her friend Muffett Tarrant founded the Peel Pantomaniacs,' said Mrs Hopson.
'She wrote the scripts to the pantomimes, they were very original interpretations of traditional stories, with a very local emphasis, lots of in-jokes. She directed as well.'
Mr and Mrs Comber were involved with fund-raising for the World Wildlife Fund and Mrs Comber loved beach combing, poetry, entertaining and cooking. She was gifted and complex and ordinary. She was quite famous but she didn't want to flaunt it over here, she just wanted to be Mrs Comber. - Nationality
- UK
- Places of residence
- Isle of Skye, Scotland, UK
Isle of Soay, Scotland, UK
Isle of Man
Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, England - Associated Place (for map)
- Scotland, UK
Members
Reviews
Beckwith continues with her self-deprecating, fish-out-of-water Hebridean series. Here, her character further embeds herself in her adopted Bruachite community, pointing out the absurdities (some of which she has proudly adopted herself) with loving humour. She captures perfectly the distinct lyrical cadences of Bruach speech and the sensible rough charm of Bruach routines. Daily life in Bruach is full of contradictions, isolation coupled with close-knit impromptu ceilidh, down-to-earth show more remedies with the superstitious, the outward brashness to outsiders that belies the deep rallying care they would offer when need be. I'm so glad I've the rest of the series to look forward to. show less
My second in the Hebrides series, but chronologically the first. As the English narrator moves to the remote Hebrides Island of Bruach, comedic farces arise as well a deep sense of community belonging.
Cultural differences in idiosyncrasies and rituals and dialects are presented humorously but with both sides being equally the butt of the joke. Who is truly ridiculous anyway? The older local one whose home is only accessible via a big but easy-to-them leap upwards over a rock wall during high show more tide or the younger out-of-towner struggling to get over the wall as the older one leaps back and forth with their luggage with the agility of a mountain goat.
We are such creatures of habit that a lot of what seems matter-of-fact to us would seem ridiculous to someone else. Fair play to Beckwith for portraying both sides as amateur anthropologists studying a new culture with such humorous affection. show less
Cultural differences in idiosyncrasies and rituals and dialects are presented humorously but with both sides being equally the butt of the joke. Who is truly ridiculous anyway? The older local one whose home is only accessible via a big but easy-to-them leap upwards over a rock wall during high show more tide or the younger out-of-towner struggling to get over the wall as the older one leaps back and forth with their luggage with the agility of a mountain goat.
We are such creatures of habit that a lot of what seems matter-of-fact to us would seem ridiculous to someone else. Fair play to Beckwith for portraying both sides as amateur anthropologists studying a new culture with such humorous affection. show less
_The Humour is Lonely_
I am sad about this book. I came to it an innocent, knowing nothing of its provenance, expecting to laugh, to learn something about the Hebrides in the 1950s (we have ancestors who came from there, so it’s cool to learn a bit), to enjoy some good writing. It came off of a friend’s shelf. She had three of Beckwith’s books, and is herself of Scottish heritage. I felt safe.
I did laugh. Sometimes quite hard. I did learn things about life in the Hebrides, and was show more reminded of places and people I knew many years ago—it was good to remember being with them. And yes, there is some excellent writing.
What breaks my heart is the endless caricatures, sometimes bluntly ugly, made of people who welcomed her into their lives. True, she has “fictionalized” it, but it doesn’t matter. Even if every person in the book is unlike anyone she met there, even if no one could think, my God, is that me she is writing about?!, even if every situation is patently not something that happened there, even if she has (and she has) made herself out in as unflattering ways as she has anyone else, it doesn’t matter. She has characterized the whole culture as dirty, foolish, unconsciously gross. She has missed the elegance of other writers who will lightly lampoon themselves and one or two others and let the other characters have their dignity. Why didn’t anyone tell her?
I do not entirely blame the author. She was a person of her times and had not the insight to recognize that just because the rest of the world thought it was okay to lampoon a whole people (or any person), it doesn’t mean it IS okay. There are intimations that she did care about the people whose world she entered and remained in for some years. And yet she was too foolish to realize that THIS KIND OF HUMOUR HURTS. It hurts an individual, and it hurts a culture by upholding stereotypes that dismiss and demean, it hurts the children growing up knowing that this is how they are seen, it hurts the children growing up thinking there is a division between themselves and someone else just because they have different manners, different ways. It hurts any possibility of true friendship between the classes and peoples involved. It hurts.
One of the realizations I had as I read in alternating delight and creeping horror, was that these ugly stereotypes were the reason, or at least part of the reason, that I grew up learning to dislike and distrust the English, the ones with perfect grammar and chilling mannerisms, and to always feel clumsy and ridiculous in comparison to them—because they despised us. I have pretty much healed from that. The world is not black and white to me as it was then. But this book is a sad reminder of that rift, one that extended, and extends, to people of all colours, all classes, all differences.
There are hints here of the damage this does to the person in the oppressor role, too. The obvious one is that she must be annihilating the goodwill of the people she lampoons, and yet she blithely and unawarely does it anyway, when she could as well have written the same book without the ugliness. It is like watching a slow motion train crash. You can see it coming, you know what is about to happen, you see the nose of the train ploughing dully into the mountain side, but the engineer cannot or will not make it stop, and all are doomed. Engineer, passengers, standers-by.
But read this. She has gone back to England for a few weeks after a couple of years in Scotland. When she returns the three elderly people she has been living with welcome her with great enthusiasm.
“The fervour of the welcome from all three of them was impressive and made that which I had received in England seem frigid in comparison (pg. 234).”
This insight, which candidly illumines something she has been hinting at in her self-deprecation throughout—her depiction of herself as humourless, arrogant, rude—is poignant. But it is instantly extinguished by her next, rallying-back-from-awareness, blunt instrument of humour:
“It was difficult to repress a feeling of elation, for the geniality of the Gael, despite its lack of sincerity, is an endearing trait (pg. 234).”
Oh, Lillian. How must you have hated yourself to shove that last spike in.
Having written this review, I find out a little bit more about Lillian Beckwith, both from LibraryThing itself, and from her Wikipedia page:
“Her life on the island provided the basis for seven books published between 1959 and 1978, although allegedly, some of her neighbours later felt that the somewhat comical characters on Beckwith’s fictional island of Bruach were too close to real persons, causing Beckwith to become something of a persona non grata in her former home.[citation needed] She moved to the Isle of Man in 1962 and died on 3 January 2004 aged 87.[1]”
If true, it doesn’t surprise me at all that she had to leave the Hebrides.
What shocks me is that (LibraryThing tells me) Pan Books put out a 2016 edition of this work. It shocks me that generations of people both English and, if you believe the reviews on her bookcovers, Scottish, have thought these warmly realistic and hilarious depictions of Hebridean life.
It is just like the caricatures of First Nations people, and similar to, if more heavy handed than, that of the Newfoundlander, that I grew up with in the same era that she was writing. But surely we don’t sell those images anymore? Surely??
I could be angry—thirty years ago I would have been. Now I am simply sad. show less
I am sad about this book. I came to it an innocent, knowing nothing of its provenance, expecting to laugh, to learn something about the Hebrides in the 1950s (we have ancestors who came from there, so it’s cool to learn a bit), to enjoy some good writing. It came off of a friend’s shelf. She had three of Beckwith’s books, and is herself of Scottish heritage. I felt safe.
I did laugh. Sometimes quite hard. I did learn things about life in the Hebrides, and was show more reminded of places and people I knew many years ago—it was good to remember being with them. And yes, there is some excellent writing.
What breaks my heart is the endless caricatures, sometimes bluntly ugly, made of people who welcomed her into their lives. True, she has “fictionalized” it, but it doesn’t matter. Even if every person in the book is unlike anyone she met there, even if no one could think, my God, is that me she is writing about?!, even if every situation is patently not something that happened there, even if she has (and she has) made herself out in as unflattering ways as she has anyone else, it doesn’t matter. She has characterized the whole culture as dirty, foolish, unconsciously gross. She has missed the elegance of other writers who will lightly lampoon themselves and one or two others and let the other characters have their dignity. Why didn’t anyone tell her?
I do not entirely blame the author. She was a person of her times and had not the insight to recognize that just because the rest of the world thought it was okay to lampoon a whole people (or any person), it doesn’t mean it IS okay. There are intimations that she did care about the people whose world she entered and remained in for some years. And yet she was too foolish to realize that THIS KIND OF HUMOUR HURTS. It hurts an individual, and it hurts a culture by upholding stereotypes that dismiss and demean, it hurts the children growing up knowing that this is how they are seen, it hurts the children growing up thinking there is a division between themselves and someone else just because they have different manners, different ways. It hurts any possibility of true friendship between the classes and peoples involved. It hurts.
One of the realizations I had as I read in alternating delight and creeping horror, was that these ugly stereotypes were the reason, or at least part of the reason, that I grew up learning to dislike and distrust the English, the ones with perfect grammar and chilling mannerisms, and to always feel clumsy and ridiculous in comparison to them—because they despised us. I have pretty much healed from that. The world is not black and white to me as it was then. But this book is a sad reminder of that rift, one that extended, and extends, to people of all colours, all classes, all differences.
There are hints here of the damage this does to the person in the oppressor role, too. The obvious one is that she must be annihilating the goodwill of the people she lampoons, and yet she blithely and unawarely does it anyway, when she could as well have written the same book without the ugliness. It is like watching a slow motion train crash. You can see it coming, you know what is about to happen, you see the nose of the train ploughing dully into the mountain side, but the engineer cannot or will not make it stop, and all are doomed. Engineer, passengers, standers-by.
But read this. She has gone back to England for a few weeks after a couple of years in Scotland. When she returns the three elderly people she has been living with welcome her with great enthusiasm.
“The fervour of the welcome from all three of them was impressive and made that which I had received in England seem frigid in comparison (pg. 234).”
This insight, which candidly illumines something she has been hinting at in her self-deprecation throughout—her depiction of herself as humourless, arrogant, rude—is poignant. But it is instantly extinguished by her next, rallying-back-from-awareness, blunt instrument of humour:
“It was difficult to repress a feeling of elation, for the geniality of the Gael, despite its lack of sincerity, is an endearing trait (pg. 234).”
Oh, Lillian. How must you have hated yourself to shove that last spike in.
Having written this review, I find out a little bit more about Lillian Beckwith, both from LibraryThing itself, and from her Wikipedia page:
“Her life on the island provided the basis for seven books published between 1959 and 1978, although allegedly, some of her neighbours later felt that the somewhat comical characters on Beckwith’s fictional island of Bruach were too close to real persons, causing Beckwith to become something of a persona non grata in her former home.[citation needed] She moved to the Isle of Man in 1962 and died on 3 January 2004 aged 87.[1]”
If true, it doesn’t surprise me at all that she had to leave the Hebrides.
What shocks me is that (LibraryThing tells me) Pan Books put out a 2016 edition of this work. It shocks me that generations of people both English and, if you believe the reviews on her bookcovers, Scottish, have thought these warmly realistic and hilarious depictions of Hebridean life.
It is just like the caricatures of First Nations people, and similar to, if more heavy handed than, that of the Newfoundlander, that I grew up with in the same era that she was writing. But surely we don’t sell those images anymore? Surely??
I could be angry—thirty years ago I would have been. Now I am simply sad. show less
An absolute delight of a (semi-autobiographical) novel, full of sweetly and slyly humorous anecdotes of daily life in rural Hebrides.
It's a relaxing catalogue of local habits and relationships, seasonal chores and activities, and occasional celebratory village events, juxtaposed against the wildness of the scenery, the toughness of the characters, and hardships of communal self-sufficiency. In a way, the setting and tone reminded me of The Summer Book by Tove Jansson.
I'm so happy to find out show more that this is part four of Beckwith's Hebridean series of six books. I'm looking very forward to hunting down and reading the rest. show less
It's a relaxing catalogue of local habits and relationships, seasonal chores and activities, and occasional celebratory village events, juxtaposed against the wildness of the scenery, the toughness of the characters, and hardships of communal self-sufficiency. In a way, the setting and tone reminded me of The Summer Book by Tove Jansson.
I'm so happy to find out show more that this is part four of Beckwith's Hebridean series of six books. I'm looking very forward to hunting down and reading the rest. show less
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