My Family and Other Animals Durrell had given a talk in 1952 called "My Island Tutors", in which he had described four of the tutors he had had on Corfu, but had made no other use of his pre-war memories.Botting (1999), p. 226. He planned the book meticulously: there would be three parts, one for each of the villas, and he decided to constantly switch between the three main themes of the book—the landscape, the inhabitants and animals, and his family's eccentricities—to prevent a reader from becoming bored with any one of the topics.Hughes (1997), p. 76. He planned the order in which every character (human and animal) would be introduced. When he began to recover from the jaundice, he returned to Bournemouth, and began to write, producing 120,000 words in just six weeks. Curtis Brown and Rupert Hart-Davis were delighted with the manuscript, and assured him it would be a bestseller.Botting (1999), pp. 226–229.
My Family and Other Animals Durrell had given a talk in 1952 called "My Island Tutors", in which he had described four of the tutors he had had on ,Corfu but had made no other use of his pre-war memories.Botting (1999), p. 226 He planned the book meticulously: there would be three parts, one for each of the villas, and he decided to constantly switch between the three main themes of the book—the landscape, the inhabitants and animals, and his family's eccentricities—to prevent a reader from becoming bored with any one of the topics.Hughes (1997), p. 76. He planned the order in which every character (human and animal) would be introduced. When he began to recover from the jaundice, he returned to Bournemouth, and began to write, producing 120,000 words in just six weeks. Curtis Brown and Rupert Hart-Davis were delighted with the manuscript, and assured him it would be a bestseller.Botting (1999), pp. 226–229.