Eva Ibbotson | Slightly Foxed literary review magazine

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The Morning Gift, [85] 86

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How to Marry an Earl

Emily Schroeder on Eva Ibbotson The Secret Countess

As a little girl I used to hate flying because it hurt my ears. And when I say hurt, I mean it felt as if someone was trying to drill right through them. This was unfortunate, since we regularly flew to Germany to visit family every Christmas, and often over Easter or the summer too. Of course I tried all the usual remedies – chewing gum; sucking mints; swallowing then yawning; yawning then swallowing. But as with most aches and pains, nothing worked half as well as a good book. And the book I remember working best was Eva Ibbotson’s A Countess below Stairs (1981, later reissued as The Secret Countess).

The Colour of Sunlight

Sue Gee on Eva Ibbotson, The Morning Gift

Eva Ibbotson’s The Morning Gift (1993) opens in Vienna, the author’s birthplace, sweepingly evoked as a city of dramatic turns of history, of music, psychoanalysis and intellectual brilliance, and comes to rest at last on the Berger family, part Jewish, part Catholic, living ‘on the first floor of a massive apartment house built round a courtyard with a chestnut tree’.

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