Maude Ffoulkes [1937]
This is another volume of memoirs by a travelinmg English lady. Unlike so many of the others, however, she was not an out-of-work nanny or governess. She actually WROTE for a living. And, like most writers, she had he adventures as well as ups & downs.
A lot of us have actually read her work without knowing it. Ms. Ffoulkes was a much in demand ghost-writer as well as a regular contributor to newspapers & magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. The list of her "collaborators" as she prefers to call them is impressive: the Crown Princess of Saxony, Crown Prince of Germany, Countess Marie Larisch, Louise of Coburg, Baroness de Stoeck, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria and King "Zugon" of Albania. She counted the Infanta Eulalia as one of her closest friends and had somewhat of a scandadlous relationship with an Italian officer named Biselli. Apparently he was the center of an very public trial of the time.
Ms. Ffoukes [love that name!] moved around a lot. Sometimes in a lovely Italian guest cottage on an Italian island estate, a lavish home in Morocco, and attic in Piccadilly. She wanders Europe making and loosing her livlihood by apparently using well-placed friends to secure writing comissions. Usually it seems to work. All along her treks comes along with her, a faithful female companion "Lizzie" who shares the trails of broken down cars and less than first class accomodations. That Lizzie is truely a loyal friend, some of the stuff Maude puts her through.
A fun read all in all. The writing is of course dated and again the sympathies she has seem a bit ill-placed for an English woman at the time. [Her comments about Herr Hitler and company seem VERY out of place, but one must remember the year- before WWII.
She also sounds like a camp one to know. She is not shy about discussing some things, her adventure seeking tanit in Morocco comes to mind.
If you run accross the book, give it a read. I enjoyed it.
