PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR – Beautifully done. A marvellous subtle knack of catching atmosphere and landscape, an ear for the spoken word that evokes half Balzac, half Alain Fournier . . . I loved it. Gael Elton Mayo lived in two regions of France which came to mean a great deal to her. In the Franche-Comté, she lived with her husband in the fortress-château of Frontenay which had been a stronghold against the French. She had to learn, quite literally, to live with its ghosts. In this land of vast distances and turbulent rivers – Stendhal country – old ways were still adhered to. The people seemed to be partly shaped by their fierce history. The Franche-Comté, has been French only since the seventeenth century, and suffered numerous brutal attacks and betrayals during its long fight to keep its independence. When Gael Elton Mayo first knew it in the 1960s, there were still several men who preferred to live wild in the woods to more conventional ways. As she describes her experiences, the texture of life, local habits, food, architecture, and the Jurassiens, she simultaneously opens windows on to the region’s past. This is recorded in detail only by local historians, since more general histories of France tend to dismiss it with brevity. She uses the same method when describing a village in the Vaucluse – the inland part of Provence far from the crowded coast – where she bought a farmhouse some ten years after losing the château and separating from her husband. There she and her daughter made friends with a family of smallholders who, it turned out, shared similar views to her husband and his neighbours. They all felt that something of great value was being leached out of their lives by the conditions of modern life, and a gradual assimilation into the outside world. The End of a Dream is a lyrical evocation of a long-forgotten yet echoingly familiar world, and an engrossing portrayal of life in rural France predating the environmental degradation of today. SUNDAY TIMES – I find it hard to pinpoint the unique charm of this halfmemoir, half-travel book. It is about unusual people in the Jura and Provence, by an unusual person. THE SPECTATOR – The visual quality of [Gael Elton Mayo’s] writing conjures up with words a magic picture . . . describing the texture of a Jurassien village in the early 1960s, her memoir reads like Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou . . . This satire on modern mores ends up like a Proustian meditation on time. BOOKS – This book is extremely subtle both in its construction and constant changes of key . . . Gael Elton Mayo speaks of two unique regions of France with her magical voice . . . the fierce independence of the Jura, the moody mountain in Provence, the vivid pictures of people, animals, wines, food, flowers – even the Mistral – made me feel nostalgic about places I had never seen.

The End of a Dream: A Memoir

Arts & Photography

Elton Mayo, Gael

History & Criticism

bookblast epublishing

“On June 1940, while evacuation from Dunkirk was taking place in the north, my son was born at Cauderan near Bordeaux; we were part of the exodus which was surging down the roads to the south throughout June, at times under bombs from Italian planes.” So begins Gael Elton Mayo’s nail-biting autobiography. Shot at by the Nazis whilst escaping into Free France with her baby son and stateless White Russian husband; boarding a refugee ship sailing from Spain to South America, Gael eventually reaches the safety of New York, only to return to war-ravaged Europe. She writes of bohemian life in Spain in the 1950s and Paris in the 1960s; and describes working with Robert Capa and David Seymour at Magnum photographers – both were killed, in Vietnam and Suez – and with Henri Cartier-Bresson in England for Capa’s brainchild, ‘Generation X’. Her Australian-born father was a renowned industrial psychologist at Harvard. The traumatic impact of being sent away to boarding school aged eight scarred Gael for life. Artist, novelist, journalist and mother, her chaotic life travelling back and forth between America and Europe was beset by financial insecurity, broken marriages, intermittent love affairs and, in later years, recurring attacks of facial cancer. First-hand accounts of World War Two and the fight for freedom against authoritarian populism are ominously relevant to Western democracies today. The Mad Mosaic stands as a triumph of the human spirit over adversity. It is a tale of courage and optimism; survival and hope. SEAMUS HEANEY, OBSERVER – An exhilarating autobiography GLASGOW SUNDAY STANDARD – Few refugee stories outside the Auschwitz range have the peculiar poignancy of Gael Elton Mayo’s. ALASTAIR FORBES, SPECTATOR – A compulsively readable, and often deeply moving account of an unusually careless if seldom carefree life led in a rather crazy cat’s-cradle criss-cross between American and Europe. ELIZABETH LONGFORD, BOOKS & BOOKMEN – I have never read an autobiography like this one. I was hooked after the first half-dozen pages. A mixture of Kafka and Alice in Wonderland. IRISH TIMES – An interesting woman and a cool intelligent writer. BIRMINGHAM POST – Full of lively comment and atmospheric description. COURIER MAIL – Her pen inks the period in brilliant cameos. The pictures show a wistful sense of how much that was simple and good about life has been lost in humankind’s rush towards the end of the 20th century. Her story is a reflection of life as lived by the free thinkers of the period. THE TIMES – The Mad Mosaic has about it something of the disturbing impermanence of life depicted in the film Casablanca. Gael Elton Mayo (1923-92) was the youngest daughter of a pioneering, Australian-born professor of industrial psychology at Harvard. She married a white Russian during World War Two, when she was seventeen, and nearly died of puerperal fever after giving birth to their son during the bombardment of Bordeaux. They eventually escaped from war-torn France, recounted in her first novel published by Doubleday, New York, when she was twenty. As a writer she had five more novels published and three volumes of autobiography & memoir; as a painter she had nine exhibitions; and as a singer-songwriter she appeared on TV. She endured numerous facial cancer operations in the later years of her life.

The Mad Mosaic: A Life Story

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Elton Mayo, Gael. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Elton Mayo, Gael