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She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons by Kathleen Hill: book review

 



 

She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons: A Life in Novels (2017) is a memoir and a journey about the love of reading throughout life.

 

The author, from England, begins with her introduction to author Emily Dickinson and, at 12 years old in middle school, to Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart – the novel about drowning that reflected her own reality. Her trip to Paris, the river Seine, Mozart’s death, it all had an impact on her. 

 

When she married and was a teacher, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was part of the syllabus (as it was mine). The author is living in Nigeria in 1963 just after its independence, and the legacy of a violent colonialist past has a great influence on her life. At the same time, she reads the Henry James novel A Portrait of a Lady. And Isak Dineson’s (Karen Blixen’s) Out of Africa set in Kenya, just before its independence in December 1963: independence found (the countries Kathleen Hill was reading about) and independence lost (her singledom).

 

At 25 years of age, with two children, in 1965, Kathleen Hill accepts a teaching position in Avesnes and Paris, France. Next on her reading list is Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary while listening to Paul McCartney’s song Michelle Ma Belle: ‘His was the voice of possibility, of hope.’ 

 

Still in France, she reads Diary of a Country Priest, a 1936 French drama about poverty and suffering by Robert Bresson. In 1996, Hill befriends author Diana Trilling in Venice, soon after she is diagnosed with cancer, where they discuss novels and the routine of writing, and she reads Proust to the author and her family in the late afternoons. 

 

This is not just a reading-log, but also a travelog, and an introspective look at the situations and books that change thoughts and lives. This memoir is a step back in time, to the books I read, and I found myself comparing my experiences with the author’s. This memoir is a heartfelt love of literature and how it influences our lives or puts it into historical context and perspective. 



 

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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

 

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