(1944), re-titled in some editions The Cruel Month, about his ancestry and early childhood; The Scarlet Tree (1945), about his education at Eton and his first experiences of Italy; Great Morning (1947), about his boyhood and his peacetime service as an army officer; Laughter in the Next Room (1948), about his career after the First World War as a writer; and Noble Essences (1950), about his many notable friends.
[1][2] He intended it to be, as he wrote in the introduction to the first volume, "full of detail, massed or individual, to be gothic, complicated in surface and crowned with turrets and with pinnacles".
[5] Counterbalancing Sir George in the autobiography is his rambunctious Yorkshire valet, Henry Moat, whom the poet G. S. Fraser described as a Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, and whose close but stormy relationship with his exasperating and endearing employer lasted, on and off, for more than forty years.
[10][5] Writing about his mother, Lady Ida, Sitwell had to be circumspect, his sister Edith having previously been troubled by their brother Sacheverell's portrayal of her in his Splendours and Miseries.
largely moves between Renishaw, the country seat of the Sitwell family, Scarborough, where he spent much of his childhood, and the Castello di Montegufoni [it], a huge medieval castle in Tuscany purchased by Sir George.
[17][18] In the autumn of 1956 Sitwell began to dictate one further memoir, a collection of 28 disconnected anecdotes about Sir George called Tales My Father Taught Me, which was finally published in 1962.
[11] A generation weary of wartime austerity relished the sumptuousness of Sitwell's prose, and the breadth and particularity of his evocation of a time that was still within living memory, yet forever lost.
There was likewise much praise for Great Morning,[26] with George Orwell, for example, commending Sitwell's honesty and moral courage in not pretending that he had held at the beginning of the 20th century the progressive opinions common in the 1940s; he thought the three volumes published up to that point "must be among the best autobiographies of our time".
[29] The appearance of Laughter in the Next Room induced The Times Literary Supplement to predict that when completed the work would be one of "the essential autobiographies of the language",[30] and the final volume, Noble Essences, was published to almost uniform critical praise.
[35] G. S. Fraser thought that in Sir George "he had to his hand, or from the facts of memory created, one of the great comic characters in English fiction".