Cooper, Artemis : Writing at the Kitchen Table - The Authorized Biography of Elizabeth David

While still a girl, Elizabeth Gwynne longed to escape from the horsy, country-house world in which she was brought up. After being "finished" in Paris and Munich, she went on the stage, but she was restless and unsettled. In august 1939 she and her lover, Charles Gibson-Cowan set off in a boat for Greece. Trapped in Antibes by the war, Elizabeth came under the spell of Norman Douglas, one of the most important influences in her life. She and Charles set sail again just as Italy entered the war, only to find themselves interned. Eventually they reached Athens. They spent the winter of 1940-41 on a Greek island, where Elizabeth first started to cook Mediterranean food. The German invasion of the Balkans forced them to join the refugees fleeing to Egypt. In the raffish "Fortunes of War" world of Alexandria and Cairo, Elizabeth flourished and came to know writers such as Lawrence Durrell and Patrick Leigh Fermor. She also met Tony David, an officer in the Indian army. He proposed to her by letter from Italy and, to the astonishment of her friends, she accepted. After the war and a few months in India, Elizabeth returned to grey and rationed England. Exasperated by the bleakness of English food, she put pen to paper and began to work out "an agonized craving for the sun".
The result was "Mediterranean Food", a book which caught the imagination of a generation. In the course of the next decade, the happiest of her life, her books and articles inspired a cookery revolution. Elizabeth never spoke of her failed marriage, and few people knew about the other man, the great love of her life. When he left her for another woman, she thought she would never write again. Instead she opened her kitchen shop, but disagreements between the partners forced Elizabeth out. She returned to writing, but the tone of her last books was more scholarly than lyrical. Working from an extensive archive of personal papers, Artemis Cooper reveals the powerful tensions between Elizabeth David's private world and the image of the successful woman she presented to her public. It is a story that even some of her closest friends never knew.