Rosie: Scenes from a Vanished Life

Born in 1943, this is an effective and episodic autobiography of the first seventeen years of Rosie, who grew up to be the writer Rose Tremain.
Beautifully crafted and composed, this short book builds up the life of an upper-middle class English girl, unloved by her parents, but loved by her older sister, nanny and other children (stepbrother and school friends).
Initially analytically focused upon the failings of her parents, who divorce and send Rosie at the age of ten off to boarding school with her sister, it can be a depressing read . However from the love and encouragement Rosie receives from others, she develops as a person and writer.
I was disappointed that Rose finishes Rosie’s story at seventeen, but grateful for the story told.

An autobiography of Tremain’s childhood and up to, I think, her early twenties. I hadn’t realised how privileged an upbringing she’d had. Housekeepers and nannies may have been relatively common in households until the 1950s, but not where I grew up. Tremain’s family lived in London. Her father was a semi-successful playwright, who later ran off with a younger assistant. Her mother was the unloved daughter of landed gentry - and at whose country manor Tremain and her sister spent many childhood summers. Despite claiming she has never used her own life as a basis for her fiction, at intervals Tremain footnotes details and explains how they appeared in her novels and stories. Most of them are so trivial, you have to wonder why she show more bothered mentioning them. And yet the life of a school friend described in Rosie is pretty much the plot of Tremain’s Absolutely & Forever, a novel published some five years after this memoir. Tremain covers her childhood, both in London and at Linkenholt Manor, her years at boarding-school, and then a finishing school in Switzerland. It’s thin stuff, although nicely written. There are some weird connections - her piano teacher at boarding school became a successful concert pianist, but after her death her husband perpetrated a huge music fraud; the mother of another friend of Tremain was married to one of the UK’s first serial killers… It’s not that Tremain writes about a vanished life-style - there are more than enough novels and stories and films and TV series covering similar ground, some of them with more insight than Tremain musters here, for all that they’re fictional. If anything, Tremain’s life feels slightly too “off” to be really plausible as fiction. One for fans. show less