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Deadlier than the Mayle Books about moving into the French or Italian countryside are filling up the bookshops. David Sexton traces the development of a largely ludicrous genre

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From: Evening Standard - London
Date: 20010521
Author:DAVID SEXTON

PETER Mayle should be in prison.

Until he published A Year in Provence in 1989, the joys-and- tribulations-of-moving-abroad genre scarcely existed. There had been a few rarefied specimens, of course.

In 1898, Elizabeth von Arnim published a delightful example, Elizabeth and Her German Garden, a semi-fictionalised account of marrying an unappealing Teutonic aristocrat and moving to rural Germany, where she consoled herself with plants. Then in the Thirties, there was Perfume from Provence by Lady Fortescue. After losing all their money in the 1929 stock market crash, the Fortescues moved into ...

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