1939: The Last Season by Anne de Courcy

1939: The Last Season by Anne de Courcy by Anne de Courcy

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My only issue with this was that it was not long enough: I could have read it several times over. The Last Season tells the story of that final few moments of life before the war for a very privileged sector of society. Champagne flows, lobster is eaten until it runs out and then we have some more, there’s caviar for all, and house parties every other night (and every night in between) and eligible bright young things debuting and dancing and ugh, it is all delicious and I drank it all in. Structurally it’s fairly straightforward; de Courcy works her way around key figures and focal points such as the government’s final few inexorable steps towards the war, the race season, debutantes dancing the night away (chaperoned, naturellement), parties in freezing and enormous country houses where the butler would lay a ball of string out to guide you back from your room to the evening meal, I mean, ugh, I drink this all in, I do, I do.

I am fascinated by those moments of hinge, I think, where society is about to become something else and nobody knows it until, looking back, everybody does. Normally, you never know the big moments when you’re in them but there’s hints, here, of a generation knowing that everything is changing and that they are the last of their kind. I was fascinated by every chapter and moved by many of them – in one chapter, de Courcy writes about the university students of the time knowing that they will be the ones to go out and face it all … It’s hard to read, amazing to even realise, and beyond words to even, really, comprehend.

The Last Season shines in its frank delight in its topic, in its commitment towards primary sources and deeply delicious detail and sharing them with the reader – it’s hard to resist such moments as the Lady who attempts to bribe her maid’s driving text examiner: “…even if she is a little behind standard…please pass her”, Queen Mary’s gentle fishing for trinkets by complimenting them so much that the host would offer them to her, and the country house where newly arrived guests “found a dry martini, a carnation for a man’s buttonhole and an orchid for a woman’s corsage”, I MEAN, I adore it , I adore it. I’d have read this a thousand times over.

View all my reviews