The Guynd: A Scottish Journal

by Belinda Rathbone

Book Overview

A captivating memoir of one woman's relationship with a man and his mansion. When Belinda Rathbone, a New York art historian, met eccentric Anglo-Scots bachelor John Ouchterlony it was the start of a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1593720254
• ISBN13: 9781593720254
• Release Date: April 2007
• Publisher: Quantuck Lane Press
• Length: 293 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.0" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Love's Labors Lost

This is a beautiful book by a fine writer. And it deserves a much more serious second title and a more dignified cover than the paperback carries; I agree that the original title was a real loser, but surely there must be something in between that and "Living with the Laird" and a cover that looks like this is going to be a larky romp. It isn't. It is a story of two mature adults meeting at a family reunion, falling in love and marrying. She was a well-established writer, totally at home in New York and Boston; he was the owner of a decaying ancestral home in the wilds of Scotland, and obsessed with keeping it. She tried, she really tried, but even her hard work and successes on the house and the birth of a son could not save this union. But Rathbone could not be more generous to her former husband, and there is not a whiff of self-pity in her writing. Warmly recommended.

Lived it; Loved it

Ours was not the 'big' house, but the 'gardener's cottage' which we rented for a year, and both the marriage and the enterprise of that particular country home survive. But all the characteristics and challenges of the estate, garden, community, and home came to life again in the author's witty, canny prose. This is the best description of the many, layered facets of Scottish society and how the great homes and their residents fit into the scheme of their surroundings that I have read.

An engaging memoir about a Scottish mansion and a marriage

I wanted to read this witty memoir because of my romantic childhood fantasy of living in a mansion or castle in Europe. Oh how lucky the American author was to have fallen in love with Scottish man with an ancestral home and property. I was rather envious of their son, Elliot, who was able to spend his childhood exploring and playing in the gardens, on the lake, and in the house. But life isn't a fairytale. This is a story about a deteriorated, cluttered mansion, its 400 acres and a marriage that started as a whirlwind romance and came to mirror the mansion itself. There's a lot of humor in the writing. How could you not laugh at the author's stories about how hard it was to heat the house, find proper tenants, clear out a garden untouched for decades and to try to throw junk out when married to someone who can find a use for everything. If you don't know what an Aga stove is, you soon will. I highly recommend this book, but suggest curling up in a warm house with a hot cup of tea and a blanket. You'll need it.

the after of jane austen's before

What a suprising treat this book is! Darcy and Elizabeth meet some two centuries later (sure enough, at a wedding), their courtship is literally a picnic, and they proceed to spend the next ten years trying to bring his four-hundred-year-old estate back to its former glory, absent one essential ingredient: money. While Rathbone clearly has other mentors besides Austen -- Henry James, Evelyn Waugh and John McPhee come to mind -- her voice is distinctly her own, often funny, always precise. The perfect book to give to friends who are sick and tired (much as they were 200 years ago) of reading about war.

Not just another foreign fixer-upper

I purchased this book after skimming the editorial reviews, thinking this would be something like Frances Mayes books on Tuscany, or Carol Drinkwater's series on Provence (both of which I recommend.) This book is also about a couple confronted with a dilapidated treasure of a house in an interesting setting. However, it is also the story of two ultimately incompatible people, and is, in fact, a sort of generously and often humorously presented autopsy on a marriage. For some reason, it is enormously enjoyable to sit back in your comfortable chair and read all the frustrating, back-breaking details (and triumphs) of restoring a very old house and its grounds. This book provides a full measure of this delight, both indoors and out. In fact, some of the landscaping challenges are staggering! The book ends rather abruptly, with the author's realization of the degree to which she and her husband are disconnected. The reader is left with the rather wistful hope that despite the fact that the author and her son now live in Massachusetts, not Scotland, their tie to Guynd is not entirely broken.