More Was Lost - by Eleanor Perenyi Paperback

About the Book

Originally published: Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1946.

Book Synopsis

Set in a Hungarian estate on the edge of the Carpathian Mountains, this "lucid and crisp" memoir is a clear-eyed elegy to a country--and a marriage--torn apart by World War II (The New Yorker)

Best known for her classic book Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden, Eleanor Perényi led a worldly life before settling down in Connecticut. More Was Lost is a memoir of her youth abroad, written in the early days of World War II, after her return to the United States.

In 1937, at the age of nineteen, Perényi falls in love with a poor Hungarian baron and in short order acquires both a title and a struggling country estate at the edge of the Carpathians. She throws herself into this life with zeal, learning Hungarian and observing the invisible order of the Czech rule, the resentment of the native Ruthenians, and the haughtiness of the dispossessed Hungarians. In the midst of massive political upheaval, Perényi and her husband remain steadfast in their dedication to their new life, an alliance that will soon be tested by the war. With old-fashioned frankness and wit, Perényi recounts this poignant tale of how much was gained and how much more was lost.

Review Quotes

"The book is entirely unpretentious...It is always lucid and crisp...If it is possible to draw a moral from the story, it would have to have something to do with the enormous and dangerous discrepancy between the traditional American way of taking Europe as a delightful fairy tale and the picture it actually presents: of absurd, anachronistic nationalisms and unequal stages of social development tearing one another to pieces."
--Edmund Wilson, The New Yorker

"[Parts] of More Was Lost...read more delightfully than fiction. The book is full of delightful anecdotes, glimpses of semi-feudal life, vignettes of the friends and relatives with whom the Perényis passed their days."
--Catherine Maher, The New York Times

"The baronial way of life that Eleanor recorded has the historical detail of Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water, yet there is none of the traveler's distance in her writing."
--Richard Teleky, The Hopkins Review

"[Perényi] emerges from her own pages a thoroughly likable person...her book is soaked in the atmosphere of a society and way of life that were several centuries outdated even before the Germans and the Hungarians and the Ruthenians and the Russians finally obliterated it from the world. The feudalism of Hungary was rusty and obsolete, but it had its charms. Now they are only memories, so that More Was Lost has the appeal of a lost cause." --Orville Prescott, The New York Times

It's tempting to call this lovely little book "charming," but it's much steelier--and sadder--than that...How lovely that More Was Lost is lost no more.
--Britta Bohler, Open Letters Monthly

About the Author

Eleanor Perényi (1918-2009) was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Ellis Spencer Stone, a naval officer, and Grace Zaring Stone, a novelist. At the age of nineteen, she traveled to Europe with her mother and, while attending a diplomatic dinner with her parents in Budapest, met Zsigmond (Zsiga) Perényi, a young Hungarian baron. They married, moved to his family's neglected estate in Ruthenia, under Czech rule at the time, and began repairing the castle and restoring to working order the 750-acre farm and vineyard. With the outbreak of World War II, Zsiga was called to serve in the Hungarian army and persuaded Eleanor, then pregnant, to return to the United States. She settled in New York, raising her son and working as an editor for Harper's Bazaar, then as managing editor for Mademoiselle. Her first book, More Was Lost, was published in 1946, followed by a novel, The Bright Sword, in 1955. She achieved critical acclaim with Liszt: The Artist as Romantic Hero (1974), which was nominated for a National Book Award; however, her final book, Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden (1981), was Perényi's greatest success and is still considered a classic of garden writing.

J. D. McClatchy is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently Plundered Hearts: New and Selected Poems. He has written four books of prose, including Sweet Theft, and edited dozens of other books. His many libretti have been performed at the Metropolitan Opera, Covent Garden, La Scala, the San Francisco Opera, and other important houses around the world. He teaches at Yale University, where he also serves as the editor of The Yale Review.