Reviews for Hanging on

The average rating for Hanging on based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-04-28 00:00:00 Blayne Haubrich The previous volume of the diary ended with the death of Frances's husband from a heart attack. This volume begins about three weeks after that, so she is in the throes of her recent bereavement. Despite her emotional torment she takes off for an extended trip abroad for the rest of the winter. I found myself wondering how these privileged people manage to do so much visiting and travelling, and how on earth that works in the aftermath of a death! There is very little here about anything practical (which is an aspect which looms over most new widows) - she eventually returns to her house (which had been her home for over thirty years) and seems to sail through the whole business of selling it, clearing it and moving away, spending hardly any time there again. (What happened to the cat? I think I missed that!) This is a picture of an upper class social world which was still underpinned by servants and money seems never to have been a problem. How very indulged some of them were (Frances is aware of it, not all her friends seem to be) - the episode in which she and her friend are asked to come down for breakfast at 9 when staying at a country house, instead of the breakfast in bed waited on by "all these servants", is funny. The editing is rather easier and less intrusive in this volume. The diary ends on an ecstatic note: her only son, Burgo, having recently married (his young wife was another of the offspring of the Bloomsbury Group), becomes a father, and the birth of her granddaughter gives her something to live for, a purpose again after her loss. This is terribly poignant, as although there is no clue in the diary or its notes of what is about to happen, Burgo died very suddenly shortly after the baby's birth.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-08-29 00:00:00 Kyle Rishel I was not expecting much of this volume of Frances Partridge's diaries, convinced they would get less interesting as they became farther from the golden age of Bloomsbury - since Frances Partridge's claim to fame is mostly as a witness and friend of the Bloomsbury set. I was pleasantly surprised - this volume deals with the loss and mourning of her husband and her happy marital life, and for the first time Frances Partridge becomes the main character, now it's her personality, herself that matters, interesting in her own right. The book depicts the way she coped with her loss and how she endured the mourning period and was able to build herself a new life, not as happy as the one she had lived before, but satisfactory and fulfilling enough, which I think it was quite an achievement. From her diaries, Frances Partridge doesn't strikes us as a particularly intelligent person, nor especially witty or creative; her main quality is warmth, a keen aptitude to enjoy life and friendships, a kindness that must have made her dear to the people who knew her, which it seems to me a wonderful gift in itself. And so the narration of this woman's life journey, sprinkled here and there with some Bloomsbury anecdotes, and also stories about the post-Bloomsbury British literary and cultural set, makes for a very interesting and uplifting reading.