Nancy Isabel Durrell (Myers)
Birthdate: 1912
Died: 1983
Daughter of Thomas Myers; Ex-wife of Lawrence Durrell and Edwin Christian Hodgkin
Mother of Penelope Berengaria Durrell and Joanna (Hodgkin) Hines
Nancy was born in Eastbourne in 1912, and though the first five years of her life were comfortably genteel, her family suffered a mysterious downturn in fortune, necessitating a move to a factory town in Lincolnshire, where they entered that malignantly English drama of keeping up appearances. This experience, combined with a miserable spell at boarding school, left her with a lasting disdain for bourgeois convention. She escaped to art school in London, made friends with a rackety array of male students and reinvented herself as a beauty, with the help of a blunt-cut bob and borrowed lipstick.
It's almost 100 pages before Larry toddles on to the scene, a small blond man who disguises what would later prove a ferocious tongue under an endearing – to Nancy, at least – fondness for baby talk. After a spell in one of those underfurnished Sussex cottages so irresistible to 1930s bohemians, they lit out for Corfu for an Edenic period of swimming, sailing and creative work. The fall came in 1937, when they joined Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin in Paris. The couple had always rowed, but now Larry's bullying slid into cruelty ("Nothing but a dirty Jew" was a favourite insult). Nancy's apparently charming silence is revealed to be the product of a sustained campaign on the part of her husband to keep her isolated behind what Miller later described as a "wall of ice". By the time war began, the marriage was over, although the couple had by then produced a child. After an impossibly dramatic escape from Greece to Cairo aboard various boats and lorries, Nancy, her patience exhausted by a faithless spouse, left with their young daughter, left him for good, spending the rest of the war in Palestine; interesting also, that Nancy ended up in Jerusalem!
Lawrence Durrell's Spouses
Ghislaine de Boysson m. 1973–1979
Claude-Marie Vincendon m. 1961–1967
Yvette Cohen m. 1947–1955
Nancy Isobel Myers m. 1935–1947
Date info further Suggested By: Alan C. Baird mbr#46635387 18 Aug 2019
Birthdate: 1912
Died: 1983
Daughter of Thomas Myers; Ex-wife of Lawrence Durrell and Edwin Christian Hodgkin
Mother of Penelope Berengaria Durrell and Joanna (Hodgkin) Hines
Nancy was born in Eastbourne in 1912, and though the first five years of her life were comfortably genteel, her family suffered a mysterious downturn in fortune, necessitating a move to a factory town in Lincolnshire, where they entered that malignantly English drama of keeping up appearances. This experience, combined with a miserable spell at boarding school, left her with a lasting disdain for bourgeois convention. She escaped to art school in London, made friends with a rackety array of male students and reinvented herself as a beauty, with the help of a blunt-cut bob and borrowed lipstick.
It's almost 100 pages before Larry toddles on to the scene, a small blond man who disguises what would later prove a ferocious tongue under an endearing – to Nancy, at least – fondness for baby talk. After a spell in one of those underfurnished Sussex cottages so irresistible to 1930s bohemians, they lit out for Corfu for an Edenic period of swimming, sailing and creative work. The fall came in 1937, when they joined Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin in Paris. The couple had always rowed, but now Larry's bullying slid into cruelty ("Nothing but a dirty Jew" was a favourite insult). Nancy's apparently charming silence is revealed to be the product of a sustained campaign on the part of her husband to keep her isolated behind what Miller later described as a "wall of ice". By the time war began, the marriage was over, although the couple had by then produced a child. After an impossibly dramatic escape from Greece to Cairo aboard various boats and lorries, Nancy, her patience exhausted by a faithless spouse, left with their young daughter, left him for good, spending the rest of the war in Palestine; interesting also, that Nancy ended up in Jerusalem!
Lawrence Durrell's Spouses
Ghislaine de Boysson m. 1973–1979
Claude-Marie Vincendon m. 1961–1967
Yvette Cohen m. 1947–1955
Nancy Isobel Myers m. 1935–1947
Date info further Suggested By: Alan C. Baird mbr#46635387 18 Aug 2019
Nancy Isabel Durrell (Myers)
Birthdate: 1912
Died: 1983
Daughter of Thomas Myers; Ex-wife of Lawrence Durrell and Edwin Christian Hodgkin
Mother of Penelope Berengaria Durrell and Joanna (Hodgkin) Hines
Nancy was born in Eastbourne in 1912, and though the first five years of her life were comfortably genteel, her family suffered a mysterious downturn in fortune, necessitating a move to a factory town in Lincolnshire, where they entered that malignantly English drama of keeping up appearances. This experience, combined with a miserable spell at boarding school, left her with a lasting disdain for bourgeois convention. She escaped to art school in London, made friends with a rackety array of male students and reinvented herself as a beauty, with the help of a blunt-cut bob and borrowed lipstick.
It's almost 100 pages before Larry toddles on to the scene, a small blond man who disguises what would later prove a ferocious tongue under an endearing – to Nancy, at least – fondness for baby talk. After a spell in one of those underfurnished Sussex cottages so irresistible to 1930s bohemians, they lit out for Corfu for an Edenic period of swimming, sailing and creative work. The fall came in 1937, when they joined Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin in Paris. The couple had always rowed, but now Larry's bullying slid into cruelty ("Nothing but a dirty Jew" was a favourite insult). Nancy's apparently charming silence is revealed to be the product of a sustained campaign on the part of her husband to keep her isolated behind what Miller later described as a "wall of ice". By the time war began, the marriage was over, although the couple had by then produced a child. After an impossibly dramatic escape from Greece to Cairo aboard various boats and lorries, Nancy, her patience exhausted by a faithless spouse, left with their young daughter, left him for good, spending the rest of the war in Palestine; interesting also, that Nancy ended up in Jerusalem!
Lawrence Durrell's Spouses
Ghislaine de Boysson m. 1973–1979
Claude-Marie Vincendon m. 1961–1967
Yvette Cohen m. 1947–1955
Nancy Isobel Myers m. 1935–1947
Date info further Suggested By: Alan C. Baird mbr#46635387 18 Aug 2019
Birthdate: 1912
Died: 1983
Daughter of Thomas Myers; Ex-wife of Lawrence Durrell and Edwin Christian Hodgkin
Mother of Penelope Berengaria Durrell and Joanna (Hodgkin) Hines
Nancy was born in Eastbourne in 1912, and though the first five years of her life were comfortably genteel, her family suffered a mysterious downturn in fortune, necessitating a move to a factory town in Lincolnshire, where they entered that malignantly English drama of keeping up appearances. This experience, combined with a miserable spell at boarding school, left her with a lasting disdain for bourgeois convention. She escaped to art school in London, made friends with a rackety array of male students and reinvented herself as a beauty, with the help of a blunt-cut bob and borrowed lipstick.
It's almost 100 pages before Larry toddles on to the scene, a small blond man who disguises what would later prove a ferocious tongue under an endearing – to Nancy, at least – fondness for baby talk. After a spell in one of those underfurnished Sussex cottages so irresistible to 1930s bohemians, they lit out for Corfu for an Edenic period of swimming, sailing and creative work. The fall came in 1937, when they joined Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin in Paris. The couple had always rowed, but now Larry's bullying slid into cruelty ("Nothing but a dirty Jew" was a favourite insult). Nancy's apparently charming silence is revealed to be the product of a sustained campaign on the part of her husband to keep her isolated behind what Miller later described as a "wall of ice". By the time war began, the marriage was over, although the couple had by then produced a child. After an impossibly dramatic escape from Greece to Cairo aboard various boats and lorries, Nancy, her patience exhausted by a faithless spouse, left with their young daughter, left him for good, spending the rest of the war in Palestine; interesting also, that Nancy ended up in Jerusalem!
Lawrence Durrell's Spouses
Ghislaine de Boysson m. 1973–1979
Claude-Marie Vincendon m. 1961–1967
Yvette Cohen m. 1947–1955
Nancy Isobel Myers m. 1935–1947
Date info further Suggested By: Alan C. Baird mbr#46635387 18 Aug 2019
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