Nancy Durrell was a woman famous for her silences. Anais Nin said "I think often of Nancy's most eloquent silences, Nancy talking with her fingers, her hair, her cheeks, a wonderful gift. Music again." As the first wife Lawrence Durrell, author of <I>The Alexandria Quartet</I>, it is perhaps surprising that she is an unknown entity. She is a constant presence in the biographies of Durrell and others in the Bloomsbury set, yet always a shadowy figure, beautiful and enigmatic. But who was the woman who was with Durrell during the most important years of his development as a writer? Joanna Hodgkin decides to retrace her mother's fascinating story: the escape from her toxic and mysterious family, the years in bohemian literary London and Paris in the 1930s, marriage to Durrell, and their discovery of the "Eden" of prewar Corfu. <I>Amateurs in Eden</I> is a fascinating biography of a literary marriage and of an unusual woman struggling to live an independent life.