Fresh FIction Box Not To Miss
Tessa Arlen | Edwardian Children versus Modern
Author Guest / March 15, 2017

My grandmother was an Edwardian. Whenever I say or think that it makes me realize just how close the first decade of the twentieth century actually was and at the same time what a colossal difference there is between my life in America now and the Edwardian attitudes to class, social conventions and the formality that existed between parents and their children in England when my granny was a girl. Florence Violet Williams was born in 1895, she was nineteen at the start of World War I. When her fiancé, Raymond, was killed in the Battle of Somme in 1916 Florence never thought she would marry. But she did. She married my fun-loving grandfather – George Dudley who survived the war in Mesopotamia to sweep her off her feet at a dance held in the house of a neighbor. The grandmother I knew had a cloud of white hair and large, dark eyes. Like many women of her age she never raised her voice, but she was a huge stickler for the rules. I never saw her in pants, and she always wore a hat when she went out and if you wore a hat you had to wear gloves…