Fled Is That Music — Desiree Meyler

It has been said that the Edwardian age of security and pleasure didn't end in 1910 but in August 1914. Alix Paget, a parson's daughter from the North Riding of Yorkshire, has her first taste of London life and the social Season when she comes out under the patronage of her rich aunt Nora. She thinks she has given her heart to the rather disreputable Captain Guy Tancred and that her feelings for Christopher Gromont are only those of a cousin-by-marriage. With the outbreak of war she is thrown into a very different life, emancipated in one stroke from the sheltered one she has been used to always. Kit too is changed. They belong to a fated generation. Désirée Meyler's charming novel has captured the atmosphere of England before and during the First World War perfectly. Désirée Meyler was born into a Pembrokeshire family in west Wales. Whilst studying at the School of Art, Cambridge, alongside fellow student Ronald Searle in the late 1930s, she decided to change direction and became a prolific short story writer following the outbreak of War. Her first novel, The Quiet Rebel was published in 1970.