“The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly…. It was warm as high summer, and bars of sunshine lay honey-coloured across the floor, the air above them shimmering with motes; and bees droned about a purple branch of viburnum in a vase on the mantelpiece. We four girls were bathed in a sense of leisure we had never enjoyed before and were never to enjoy again, for we were going to leave school at the end of term, and we had passed all the examinations which were to give us the run of the adult world. We were as happy as escaped prisoners, for we had all hated being children.”
-Rebecca West, from the first page of This Real Night
Gladsome Lights 
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Such a beautiful description!
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I think this is the book of hers I’ll have to start with, just for the promise of this line. Will that work, I wonder?
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This novel does stand on its own, but if you start with it you don’t get to meet the father, or the children when they are younger. But you should do what you want 🙂 You could always read the background later!
West didn’t complete this sequel until more than 20 years later and she doesn’t leave the reader completely in the dark about what happened before.
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Interesting! I think I was happy to leave childhood behind because it seemed as if the adults got to do all the fun stuff, like keep house, cook and bake, plan gardens, kiss husbands, that sort of thing. LOVE you, GJ!
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A sense of leisure never known before or again — I remember having exactly that same feeling the summer between college graduation and real world. And it was so true.
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I’ve long been curious about this author. These few lines are lovely!
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