May Sarton

I Knew a Phoenix: Sketches For an Autobiography

The Women's Press, 1995.

On a spring evening in 1938 John Summerson, author of an acclaimed biography of Nash though as yet un-knighted, takes the author to Clarence Terrace to admire the 'cream-colored facades with their balconies and pillars that look like a long elegant palace'. They are on their way to dinner with Elizabeth Bowen, from whose drawing room Sarton looks down on 'the silent groves of trees lit up by the street lamps like stage scenery, and a patch of moonlight below shivering the lake'.