Maureen Emerson
Maureen is from an Irish-Austrian background and grew up in London. Marrying young, she brought up her family in North Africa, Lebanon, Dallas and Singapore, before settling in Provence for twenty-two years. There she worked as a local co-ordinator for CBS and NBC during the media festivals at Cannes and Monte-Carlo.
I began by asking Maureen how the idea of writing about Winifred Fortescue and Elisabeth Starr all came about. It is a fascinating story and much better related in her own words:
“We came to the South of France after having lived and worked in various countries for almost twenty years. A travelling expatriate family, we all felt it our great good fortune to be sent to such a beautiful place. It was 1977, and our home became a small farmhouse outside the village of Valbonne, in the hills above Cannes. This was a time when there was far less traffic in the countryside away from the coast. The street leading into the village was lined with lavender and, in the afternoons, elderly ladies in straw hats gathered under the trees in the village square, speaking softly in the language of Provence.
A significant background to the lives of many expatriates was the small, but well-established, Sunny Bank Anglo-American hospital in Cannes. Here we went when we needed to be ill in English. But it was more than that, it was also an expatriate social centre, with active charity sales held each month. And it was here I discovered the books of Winifred (Peggy) Fortescue – and that one had to be very quick off the mark in order to get hold of one, for this was before they were reprinted by Black Swan in the 1990s. Peggy Fortescue wrote seven books, all of which involved her life in the South of France. Her most famous was Perfume From Provence, a best-seller of the 1930s and ‘40s. In this she told the story of life in her first home, in Magagnosc, near Grasse. By 1934 she was widowed and had moved to Opio, a little further to the east, the setting for five more of her books. Reading these books, I began to feel there may be another story behind Peggy’s account of life in Opio, and particularly that of her enigmatic American friend, Elisabeth Parrish Starr. But where to begin?
Research is like a spider’s web. A small link suddenly attaches to a longer, more solid thread which, if one is fortunate, forms a circle and provides an answer. Enough of these links and threads gradually build up a story that makes sense and rings true. And it helps a great deal if one’s subjects cooperate. Sometimes Peggy and Elisabeth left me adrift, without clues. Then suddenly one or the other would take pity and throw me something to encourage me to continue: letters found in unexpected places which suddenly arrived in the post; documents from an archive; an introduction to someone who had been close to a person in the book. Every new discovery was a bonus, and yet another link which helped to tell the story of the people who lived on the hill.
I began the project in 1999, by asking an elderly resident of Opio if she knew who had lived in the four houses on the rue de la Fontaine in the 1930s. For, except for Elisabeth Starr, they are not named in Peggy’s books. It seemed that Elisabeth owned the Castello, Peggy was in Fort Escu, Charles, the 6th Marquess of Anglesey (of Plas Newydd in North Wales) had San Peyre and his cousin Polly Stapleton Cotton was at home in the Bastide. These were the people who made up the Colline des Anglais, as it was known to the local people. The first letter I wrote was to the present Lord Anglesey to ask what he knew about his father’s connection with Opio. The answer came back immediately, ‘You’d better come to Wales and look in the family archives, because it’s all here!’ Everyone wrote to everyone else on that hillside. Even when they were all living in the houses at the same time, they would send letters from house to house for only Peggy had a telephone. Much of this correspondence was all perfectly filed and catalogued by the University of Bangor library department, which made researching at Plas Newydd a great pleasure.
Apart from the vital letters at Plas Newydd, which were the foundation stone of the biography, luck has also played an important part in the research. I began searching second-hand bookshops for old books by Peggy Fortescue. In one I found a letter with the heading of the Elisabeth Starr Memorial Fund for the Relief of the Children of Provence. This was acknowledging a donation of £1.00, in which Peggy had added, rather irascibly, that she had a temperature of 101o again and that any further donations should be to her English bank and not to her. I had to find a copy of Beauty For Ashes, published in 1950, before it became clear what this fund was all about.
Another book contained a dedication written during the war years in England. Peggy thanked her doctor, Hugh Gordon, for being ‘the only doctor who respected my intelligence enough to tell me the truth, believing, I think, that I had courage enough to bear it’. This was the occasion on which she discovered she had an enlarged heart. About which fact she declared to her niece that she ‘didn't think anyone's heart could be too big.’
A contact in Amberley in West Sussex led to trunks of letters, written by Elisabeth’s American family, stored in a Sussex barn and almost forgotten. Searching in French, British and United States archives and historical societies, plus crawling round churchyards to find long forgotten graves are all part of the fun of research.
The generosity of the families concerned, both in the UK and the United States has been wonderful. This allowed me to copy and use family papers and photographs important to the book. In fact one of the greatest pleasures of writing this biography has been the people I’ve met or corresponded with along the way.
With the help of my husband Philip, Escape to Provence is entirely self-published, no subsidiary publisher. I was fortunate enough to be able to do this and felt it was the right way to go. There is far more autonomy when you self-publish. I knew exactly the colour, type and weight of paper I wanted; an easily read font and Provençal colours for a cover design I could choose myself. It’s all very hard work, there is scarcely time for leisure and the television is rarely switched on.
But with all this, and above all, in the words of the song – just as it’s never too late to fall in love, so it’s never too late to write a biography!”
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Maureen Emerson's book, Escape to Provence, is published by Chapter and Verse, ISBN: 978-0-9558321-0-9
If you'd like to contact Maureen Emerson, you can do so through her email address: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
