Susanna Johnston

Light-hearted and moving story of the beautiful friendship between John Fleming and Hugh Honour, the last great British eccentrics, and Susanna Johnston, centring around the Villa Marchio in Tuscany where they had made their life

This is the enchanting story of a beautiful, lifelong friendship and laughter centred around the Villa Marchio near Lucca where John Fleming and Hugh Honour, both art historians and the last great British eccentrics, created the perfect life for themselves by nestling in literary Tuscany. Novelist Susanna Johnston first met them when she was twenty one, penniless and at sea in Rome in the 1950s.

This is the story of a beautiful, lifelong friendship of laughter that centred around the Villa Marchio near Lucca, Tuscany, where John Fleming and Hugh Honour, both art historians and the last great British eccentrics, had created the perfect life for themselves. They first met Susanna Johnston, their quirky neighbour-to-be, at Oris Origo's villa set on a rocky promontory in Lerici when we she was down and out looking for a job as a teenager. They adopted her much like a stray cat. Why don't you stay on at Lerici and read for the blind last lover of Henry James, they suggested...?

John Fleming and Hugh Honour were giants of the art world. To Susanna Johnston, however, they were simply John and Hugh, an inseparable couple and two of her closest friends. They had met in the 1950s at Gli Scafari, the opulent villa on the Italian Riviera of the blind writer Percy Lubbock - one of Henry James' inamoratos and Iris Origo's step father - when she was twenty one, on holiday and penniless. Originally part of the Anglo-Italian world orbiting Bernard Berenson's I Tatti and Harold Acton's La Pietra in Tuscany, John Fleming and Hugh Honour were bemused by being lionised themselves by the super-rich who beat a path to their Villa Marchio. This candid memoir, full of private anecdotes, illuminates these two celebrated, passionate, and very English geniuses, through a close-up of a well-seasoned friendship of over 60 years.

This mischievous novel, set in Lucca, Italy, centres around an unexpectedly passionate affair and the ripples it causes around it. There is Patricia, a young English woman and is happily married with an Italian academic and a young son. Malise and Christian are brothers from Hertfordshire. While Malise is beautiful, smart, aloof, he is also cruel, and Christian has never been able to dampen his adoration for the older brother. Sensuous, darkly-funny bordering on the demonic, this a love story that plays wickedly with Anglo-Saxon attitudes.

This mischievous roman a clef revolves around the interactions of five main characters. Victoria, barely twenty, finds herself acting as amanuensis to Laurence, an elderly man of letters, now blind, who lives in a ravishing house by the sea in northern Italy. Soon after her arrival, she indulges in a heady night of passion with Edgar, a youthful Englishman. Their subsequent union introduces Edgar's pretentious mother Lettice, who is jealous and suspicious of her daughter-in-law's prettiness and her ability to amuse Lettice's intellectual friends. While Victoria struggles to adapt to her new surroundings, Lettice, in a bid to maintain her own social superiority, attempts to thwart her every move in hilarious fashion. Enter Archie, one of the inner circle, whose relationship with Victoria provokes a scandal that threatens to destroy her. Darkly funny and deeply insightful, Lettice & Victoria is not just a love story with a fanciful and flawed female protagonist, but a wonderful portrait of English society.