Imogen Lycett Green

Penelope Betjeman was obviously a fascinating character, coming over in some ways like a throwback to the intrepid lady travellers of the Georgian period (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lady Hester Stanhope, Emily Eden, etc.), and I've been meaning to find out more about her ever since reading A.N. Wilson's biography of her husband. So it was a pleasure to discover this account of her by one of her granddaughters. Imogen Lycett Green obviously isn't one of the world's greatest travel writers, and doesn't pretend to be a traveller anything like as intrepid as her grandmother, but she sets out five years after PB's death to retrace the steps of an Indian journey they took together and make contact with some of her Indian friends. The result is a decently competent mix of biography and travel writing, with nothing really irritating about it apart from some clumsy editing, and occasionally it's even rather funny. But the funniest bits are invariably the passages quoted from PB's own letters. What a shame she only ever got around to writing two books.

One subject Lycett Green sidesteps around rather is the nature of her grandparents' relationship. Possibly she simply doesn't know how they felt about each other, possibly she didn't want to cause embarrassment by mentioning the lady with whom her grandfather spent most of the last thirty years of his life, but the uninformed reader might well be a bit surprised at Lady Betjeman swanning off to India for six or nine months when her husband was in poor health.… (mais)