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Bea and Proust

11th September 2009 by Helena 5 Comments  

A few evenings ago I went out and left Rupert in charge of the children. The next morning when I got up I found Bea on the sofa reading Proust. In French.
“What’s going on?” I asked him.  He told me he had read them the beginning of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu as a bedtime story the night before. He got out of bed (unusual before his cup of tea) to come and look at Bea.

proust.jpg

“Are you enjoying the book?” he asked her.

“I am,” she replied. “But it’s not like a book, more like poetry.”

beatrice.jpg

I think we have a literary critic in the making. And now I can bore people at dinner parties for years to come by boasting “well, of course Bea was reading Proust when she was eight, in the original French, bien sur.”

As for baby Bea, she has read six pages (more than I have ever read) and is still very fond of it. I hope she experiences a similar love affair to the one I had with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the Famous Five at her age.

Her new hero Proust describes it very well: “There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.” 

Copyright: Helena Frith Powell 2009


Filed Under: Abu Dhabi, Books, Children, blog --> Tagged With: proust

5 thoughts on Bea and Proust

  • Elisabeth Loesch says:
    11th September 2009 at 9:08 am

    Good God! It looks like you’re breeding a team of surdoués.

    There is a French joke about (grown up) people who pretend to be re-reading A la recherche du temps perdu. Meaning they never actually read it in the first place, but it’s kind of posh to say that they are giving the book another shot. pffft!

  • Elena says:
    11th September 2009 at 10:40 am

    I’m still in love with The famous five;) x

  • Phillip Vanderwarker says:
    11th September 2009 at 10:24 pm

    a credit to you both.

  • Valerie says:
    12th September 2009 at 5:50 pm

    When Bea reaches her 10th birthday give her the book “Marianne’s Dreams” by Catherine Storr. I adored it and it haunted me (in a good way) all my life. Then when I cleared out my Mum’s house I found it and read it again and it was still wonderful (and I was rather chuffed at the standard of books I was reading back then).

  • mimi says:
    13th September 2009 at 10:38 pm

    Bea has also read more that I ever have.
    Aren’t you very proud of her?

    She looks very like you in the photo too- especially the shape of her mouth.

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Helena Frith Powell was born in Sweden to a Swedish mother and Italian father, but grew up mainly in England. She is the author of eleven books, translated into several languages including Chinese and Russian. She wrote the French Mistress column The Sunday Times about life in France for several years. She is a regular contributor to the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Tatler Magazine and Harper’s Bazaar.

Helena has been the editor of four magazines, including M Magazine, a supplement for the Abu Dhabi based National Newspaper and FIVE, a high-end fashion glossy, also published in Abu Dhabi. Helena was also editor in chief of 360 Life, a quarterly glossy magazine published with the Sports 360 Newspaper in Dubai, part of the Chalhoub Group.

Helena contributes regularly to UK-based newspapers and magazines and holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cambridge. Helena is working on a thriller called Thin Ice that will be published in 2021 as well as a novel about the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield called Sense of an Echo.

Her latest non-fiction work Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles came out in hardback in 2016 and in paperback in April 2018.

Helena, who was educated at Durham University, lives in the Languedoc region of France with her husband Rupert and their three children.

Bibliography

More France Please, we’re British; Gibson Square 2004

Two Lipsticks and a Lover 2005; Gibson Square (hardback)

All You Need to be Impossibly French; (US version of above) Penguin 2006

Two Lipsticks and a Lover; Arrow Books (paperback) 2007

Ciao Bella Gibson Square; (hardback) 2006

Ciao Bella Gibson Square; (paperback) 2007

So Chic! (French version of Two Lipsticks) Leduc Editions 2008 (also translated into Chinese, Russian and Thai)

More, More France; Gibson Square 2009

To Hell in High Heels; Arrow Books 2009 (also translated into Polish)

The Viva Mayr Diet; Harper Collins 2009

Love in a Warm Climate; Gibson Square 2011

The Ex-Factor; Gibson Square 2013

Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles; Gibson Square 2016

The Arnolfini Marriage; Amazon Kindle December 2016

Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles (paperback); Gibson Square spring 2018

The Longest Night; Gibson Square spring 2019

 

 

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