More Was Lost: A Memoir [Paperback]

Set in a Hungarian estate on the edge of the Carpathian Mountains, this “lucid and crisp” memoir is a clear-eyed elegy to a country—and a marriage—torn apart by World War II (The New Yorker).

Best known for her classic book Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden, Eleanor Perényi led a worldly life before settling down in Connecticut. More Was Lost is a memoir of her youth abroad, written in the early days of World War II, after her return to the United States.

In 1937, at the age of nineteen, Perényi falls in love with a poor Hungarian baron and in short order acquires both a title and a struggling country estate at the edge of the Carpathians. She throws herself into this life with zeal, learning Hungarian and observing the invisible order of the Czech rule, the resentment of the native Ruthenians, and the haughtiness of the dispossessed Hungarians. In the midst of massive political upheaval, Perényi and her husband remain steadfast in their dedication to their new life, an alliance that will soon be tested by the war. With old-fashioned frankness and wit, Perényi recounts this poignant tale of how much was gained and how much more was lost.“The book is entirely unpretentious...It is always lucid and crisp...If it is possible to draw a moral from the story, it would have to have something to do with the enormous and dangerous discrepancy between the traditional American way of taking Europe as a delightful fairy tale and the picture it actually presents: of absurd, anachronistic nationalisms and unequal stages of social development tearing one another to pieces.”
—Edmund Wilson, The New Yorker

“[Parts] of More Was Lost...read more delightfully tlcî