The Guynd: Love & Other Repairs in Rural Scotland - Hardcover

Rathbone, Belinda

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1593720157 ISBN 13: 9781593720155

Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher, 2005

Synopsis

A woman from New England falls for a charming Scottish landowner only to discover she’s also in a complex relationship with his family’s 400-year-old ancestral estate, The Guynd. Funny and heartwarming, this is the story of a house, a place, and a marriage.

Guynd (rhymes with “wind“) is Gaelic for “a high, marshy place.” It’s there that Belinda Rathbone’s memoir takes place after her unlikely marriage and move to pastoral Scotland. There she learns to cope with a grand but crumbling mansion still recovering from the effects of two world wars, an overgrown landscape, a derelict garden, troublesome tenants, local aristocracy, Scottish rituals, and a husband who loathes change.

Alternating between enchantment and near despair, Rathbone digs into family and local history in an effort to understand her new surroundings and the ties that bind us through generations. “The book lifts and excels,” wrote The New York Times, “Rathbone nails down a little bit of the Scottish soul in all its stark splendor.”

The perfect book for anyone who loves a fish-out-of-water romance and a touching story of home.

About this title

About the Author

Belinda Rathbone is a biographer and historian who has written widely on 20th-century American photography. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Walker Evans: A Biography, as well as important essays on the work of Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, and many contemporary artists and photographers. Ms. Rathbone’s books with Godine include the memoir, The Boston Raphael: A Mysterious Painting, an Embattled Museum in an Era of Change & A Daughter’s Search for the Truth .

Reviews

As Rathbone tells it, when she got married it wasn't so much to a man as to his ancestral house in Scotland-the Guynd of the title-and the deeply ingrained way of life that came with it. Her attitude toward the enormous project of restoring the manor while also figuring out and trying to fit in with the clannish Scots is at turns enthusiastic and exasperated, and her anecdotes about the renovation, from massive hedge-trimming and garden rehabilitation to a reupholstering undertaking of gargantuan proportions, will have home improvement fanatics mad with jealousy. The writing is vivid, but unlike in her acclaimed 1995 biography of Walker Evans, Rathbone here leaves out much of her interior life, so the reader witnesses, to varying degrees, her disintegrating marriage and the fervor with which she rehabs the old house, but her reticence to turn her gaze inward hampers any emotional connection with the reader. Thoughtful descriptions of her attempts to understand her Scottish neighbors sometimes distract from this, but for the most part she and the narrative are tied to the Guynd, and the result is as frustrating and fascinating for the reader as the actual experience was for her.
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The Guynd, an old and valued Scottish estate, is unusual because it is still in the hands of the original family. Rathbone marries John, 13 years her senior, and becomes, for a time, Guynd's mistress. Shabby though it may be, the estate, with its fields and tenants, is a presence in the region. John does some restoration work, repairing the underlying fabric, but basically he doesn't want to change anything. Belinda needs to make a livable home for them and their son, and hopes to bring back some elegance and grandeur. Since no one in the family has ever discarded anything, she has diaries, letters, and other documents of what once was to guide her, and she writes beautifully of the landscape and house, of her little victories and major compromises, and then, of how her life at Guynd comes to an end. Rathbone's fine visual sense and understated style results in an appealing book for those who love historic houses and the human stories they contain. Danise Hoover
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1593720157
• ISBN 13: 9781593720155
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304