More Was Lost

Eleanor Perenyi's story is beautifully written and reads like the best historical fiction. The book describes a world that is gone forever, but lives in her descriptions of a castle east of Budapest, feudal customs and the wide-eyed love of a naive, privileged woman. Regrettably there is no sequel to tie up the many loose ends which are left at the end of the story. Who was this remarkable woman? Why didn't she write more books? This book is not to be missed.

More Was Lost, first published in 1946, has the feel of the movie classic Casablanca, but with Katherine Hepburn playing Ilsa instead of Ingrid Bergman. The beautiful author, an only child then 19 years old, is travelling though Europe with her imposing mother, when she meets the handsome Oxford-educated son of a Hungarian baron at a dinner-party in Budapest. Love, obstacles, obstacles overcome - the initial chapters of the book read like the fairy tale the author seems to have been looking for in 1937, when, as she writes, "I had not decided what to do with my life." A feminist by conviction before the stance became commonplace, Mrs Perényi recounts the details of her exotic life as the new châtelaine in a Baroque castle in Ruthenia with candor, understatement and wit. Unlike most fairy tales, however, More Was Lost doesn't have a conventional happy ending - the war closes in on the enchanted couple and, pressured by her mother and her husband, Perényi, now pregnant, makes the fateful (and regretful) decision to leave the castle and her husband and the dreamlike life she has made for herself. The smug assurance of the young bride is transformed into the poignant awareness of the single mother, who, at the end of the memoir, is now living with her child in New York and notes, "For a long time, the memory of the past sustains you, and when it no longer does, you are already a different person." Mrs Perényi is a natural writer, with delightfully crisp diction that readers fond of Waugh, Sybille Bedford or Nancy Mitford will savor. More Was Lost is an elegant, idiosyncratic memoir of a strange time and place, for her and for the world. It is a pleasure to have this book back in print.