Jersey

We know of the Durrells mainly through their own writings, outstandingly My Family and Other Animals, about their years in Corfu in the 1930s, and from the image of them created by TV and film adaptations of this work. Gerald and Lawrence were the best known members of the family, the first as a zoologist and conservationist, the second as an experimental writer. Their siblings, Margaret (Margo) and Leslie, will always be perceived through the lens Gerald turned on them in My Family – the former as a flighty eccentric, something like an extra from a Carry On film, the latter as a pantomime villain. Their mother, Louisa, was loved unreservedly by her children and comes across in My Family as a kindly eccentric.

In 1882, a sneaky reporter from the Figaro managed to track down Victor Hugo’s only surviving, long-forgotten child to an expensive mental asylum on the edge of Paris. He stalked her as she was being taken for a walk in the local park. She had the ‘profile of a duchess’, ‘staring black eyes’, a perilous hopping gait and odd compulsions. According to the reporter’s inside source, ‘Mme Pinson’ had spent a month removing all the rocks from the asylum’s long driveway and then replaced them one at a time. Thirty-three years later, she could still play the piano and claimed to be writing an opera titled Venus in Exile. She also enjoyed tearing up the pages of books and stuffing the confetti into her bag.