Fiction
Juliet Nicolson
Abdication
11:30am | Sunday 16 September 2012Tickets: | Duration: | Venue: |
£N/A | 1 Hour | Blenheim Palace, Courtyard Restaurant |
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This was an Oxford Literary Festival 2012 Event.
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Critically acclaimed social historian Juliet Nicolson discusses her debut novel, a love story set in the 1930s with a backdrop of the impending abdication of King Edward VIII and the outbreak of war. Abdication follows 19-year-old May Thomas as she arrives at Liverpool Docks from Barbados, escaping the constraints of her childhood on a sugar plantation. She secures a job as chauffeuse and secretary to Sir Philip Blunt, chief whip in Baldwin’s Conservative Government. The job opens her eyes to Britain’s upper society and she forms a friendship with an old school friend of the king’s lover Wallis Simpson. She also falls for a young Oxford University student friend of the Blunts’ son Rupert.
Nicolson is a writer and journalist whose works include The Perfect Summer: Dancing into Shadow in 1911 and The Great Silence: 1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War.