After my mother died I was sent back to her family in Gloucestershire. I never knew my father's relations because they had all emigrated to Canada. My mother's brother, Cecil Elwes, was appointed my guardian. He was an army officer wounded in the Boer War and the First World War, and like nearly all the men who survived the latter ordeal he was somewhat temperamental. Passionately addicted to fox hunting, he hunted his own pack of hounds over his estate; one of the last private packs in Britain. I was taught to ride and participated in the hunt. I only half enjoyed the experience because I was only a moderately good rider.

My other guardian was my elder sister, then a young woman coping with a difficult marriage. Her husband was an aviation hero of the First World War; one of the few to survive, and he too was over-temperamental. As he was still in active service and moved from one air base to another in England and the Near East, my sister and I only met occasionally.

My mother had decreed in her will that I should be sent to a certain boarding school, Runton Hill School, in Norfold (I think it may still exist). It literally saved my life because I was lonely and unhappy at home. I discovered that I had an adequate brain. I passed the school leaving exam, known as "School Certificate" with three "credits" out of five subjects, in French, Mathematics, and English. But not in History. This was certainly because the subject was not well taught; we were merely given a list of European wars.

I determined to go to Oxford to study English. This was, of course, contrary to family tradition, and I had to insist. It was then supposed by the "gentry" that "clever women never found husbands", and marriage was considered a woman's only possible role.

Entry to a woman's university college at Oxford was then anyhow difficult. It was necessary to pass a competitive entrance examination: in my year only thirty places were available for over three hundred candidates. I passed in seventh place with the mention "highly commended". The Elwes family was unimpressed, but my kind stepfather rewarded me with a wonderful trip round Europe and North Africa in the course of which I saw most of the outstanding monuments.

This journey gave me a feeling of being "European" rather than British, and opened up historical perspectives. I went to Oxford in 1929 with hopes, but met intellectual disappointment.

I went to Lady Margaret Hall, at Oxford, to study English literature. I was disappointed by the teaching. About half was devoted to the study of Anglo-Saxon, a dead language of considerable complexity. The teaching of later works was uninspired, consisting almost entirely of verbal analysis.

At the beginning of the third (in theory final) year, I fell ill with an infection which would certainly have been rapidly dealt with today, but which kept me in bed over three months and was followed by a surgical operation. I was not extremely ill, but I supposed I had cancer and would not survive. No one was available to shake me out of this phantasm. My program of work was interrupted; I should need to spend a fourth year at the university to get a degree.

Meanwhile the question of marriage arose, then a must in a woman's life. While marriage was considered indispensable, it was not approved of in university circles: one could not be a married woman student at that time. On the other hand any union outside marriage was ruthlessly condemned and incurred permanent social exclusion. Faced with these problems, as well as the death of my kindly stepfather, I chose marriage, which meant leaving Oxford without a degree.

The recklessness of this decision was aggravated by the conviction that anyhow I had not long to live. So I married a handsome Austrian aristocrat, son of a deceased general, with uncertain means of livelihood. I therefore took him to my father's country, Southern Rhodesia, where we earned a precarious income growing tobacco. But we lived intensely, hunting wild animals on horseback, with hounds, and riding vast distances. There were as yet no bridges, and we had to cross rivers in the wet season crouching on the back of a swimming horse. This was indeed "lived life", as opposed to the arid "bookishness" of Oxford.

Second World War

I adapted to this life, but without real conviction, until just before the outbreak of the Second World War. By then Germany had occupied Austria and I found myself with a German passport, because at that period women lost their nationality on marriage to foreigners. My husband and I agreed to divorce; he stayed in Rhodesia, where he did well producing tobacco through the war. I found work in England as secretary to the inventor of a secret weapon, an interesting man, Peter Eckersley, who had created broadcasting in England, a former associate of the famous physicist Marconi.

The war increased my interest in history; I wanted to know why we were engaged in yet another struggle with a European power. I read a great deal. I even joined the Communist Party but abandoned it after three months because I was repelled by the arrogant dogmatism of Marxism. My employer, who had a modern outlook, encouraged me to study, and gave me confidence in being a woman. At that period women were handicapped by the pervasive prejudice that women's brains were physically different from those of men, and inferior, and that if they tried to use their minds like men they risked becoming insane. I was not wholly released from these notions until, in my forties, I read Simone de Beauvoir's invaluable book, The Second Sex [many editions, available in paperback by Vintage Books, 1989] which marked a turning point in my life and the beginning of my serious work as a historian.

By then I had settled in Corsica. Before that I had met and married Sir Francis Rose during the war, in England, in 1943. Friends discouraged the marriage, because Francis was said to be "impossibly eccentric"; perhaps, but he was also an extremely talented artist. He had been patronized in his youth by Gertrude Stein, the celebrated writer and collector, who bought his paintings along with the works of Picasso.

We married and stayed happily together for some ten years. His abundant creativity stimulated whatever writing talent I possessed, and I wrote The Traveller's Eye, published in 1947, a survey of English travel literature through the ages. It taught me more history, the necessary scaffolding of the subject. It aroused public interest, and awoke in me an acute desire to write a travel book based on my own experience.

The opportunity came when my husband and I met by chance a young Corsican, Jean Cesari, who had just been demobilized in London from the Free French Forces. He spoke to us of his island, and arranged for us to visit his family there. We went in 1948; he showed us a previously unrecognized group of proto-historic statues of chiefs or warriors: a major archaeological find.

I became aware of prehistory. It was not Napoleon that held me to Corsica, but my interest in the whole evolution of the country and its people from the earliest times. I could not write about Corsica, or even live there, without some understanding of its particular under-developed, strange, and disturbing way of life; in short, its culture. And the explanation of this, I soon realized, was to be found in its history (including prehistory).

Moving to Corsica leads to a critical change in career

When I arrived in Corsica, with my husband, Sir Francis Rose (the painter), in 1948, I had no claim to be a historian. I was looking for material for a travel book, a recognized and esteemed genre in English literature which I had studied in my book The Traveller's Eye, published in London the year before. The great majority of these works include considerable historical knowledge of the countries they describe; and outstanding example is James Boswell's well-known Account of Corsica (1768) which offers a history of the island with an invaluable close-up portrait of Pasquale Paoli, who then governed it as an independent state.

I realized that to have any understanding of the island for writing the book I envisaged, it was indispensable to have a grasp of its history. Why was this fertile island, well-watered and covered in abundant vegetation, so neglected, under-populated, under-cultivated, so lacking in good roads? Why did its people seem so melancholy and resentful, as though brooding on past injuries? Because, as I soon learned, their past seemed to them one huge injury. Why? Because their island had been repeatedly invaded, conquered, occupied and colonized since the fall of Rome. Why? Because it occupies a key strategic site in the Mediterranean, and so was coveted, fought for, and bought and sold by the rival European powers.

After the withdrawal of the Romans, who had given the Corsicans 700 years of peace, they had been almost continuously at war. Having just emerged myself from World War II, I knew what psychological damage this could do. Moreover, the Corsicans had always been too few in numbers and too poorly armed to avoid defeat, and their only period of independence, fourteen years under Pasquale Paoli, had ended with the French conquest in 1769. The rule of the French monarchy had been severe; the last revolt, in 1774, had been brutally crushed.

But the Corsicans welcomed the French Revolution and, in 1789, voluntarily voted themselves into the French Empire in fear of being bartered back to Genoa. The decision was wise. France offered a form of partnership: Corsicans enjoyed the same rights as other French citizens, whereas the Genoese, who had ruled, or attempted to rule them during nearly four hundred years, treated them as a second rate people, subjected to colonial exploitation.

All this, as I could clearly see, had left its scars; towns which were nearly all conceived as fortresses, acres and acres of empty, abandoned countryside, vast ports that harbored only a few small fishing boats; and, the vendetta: a relentless form of traditional justice adhered to in the deep-rooted belief that foreign codes of justice were less than just (it has died out now, though political feuding is still rife).

I had found my material too much. I secured a contract with an English publisher (Longman Green), bought a garret flat in Ajaccio and set to work for years. I survived during this period by journalism, writing articles for French and English magazines (and even Swedish, though I don't pretend to understand the translations), by reporting for an English daily paper (there was plenty to be said during the Algerian War), by guide work, which I very much enjoyed when I had to organize "culture tours", and then by working as interpreter, then lecturer, for Queens University of New York, which organized an annual "seminar" -- congress -- in Ajaccio for several years after 1968. In 1968 and 1971 I was invited to the University as Assistant Visiting Professor of Social Anthropology.

My grasp of ethnology -- learnt from personal experience -- was evidently better appreciated than my qualifications as a historian. I was to become a historian later, through a series of encounters with highly qualified and encouraging historical scholars, as follows.

First, Pierre Lamotte, then keeper of the Corsican Archives (which are now the Archives departementales de la Corse-du-Sud). He communicated to me the original document of the constitution of Pasquale Paoli, the constitution he promulgated when he had been elected "General-in-Chief" of the Corsican nation in 1755. Though it had been for a number of years in the archives, it had not, curiously enough, attracted interest. Yet it is an astonishing document, proclaiming ideas much in advance of its time. So one reads in the opening phrase: "...the people of Corsica, legitimately master of itself"... "having reconquered its liberty", wishing to create a constitution "fit to ensure the felicity of the nation"; so runs this declaration of the rights of man, more than two decades before the American Revolution.

I felt I had fallen on a document of immense value. Pierre Lamotte helped me transcribe it, and in 1970 I had the immense satisfaction of giving a communication on the subject to an enthusiastic audience at the University of Moscow.

I can say that Paoli carried me round the world. Next, back in England, where in 1984 I lectured at the Royal Society of Literature on "Boswell's Corsica", then to a lecture tour on this subject for the British Council in Italy, where I visited Florence, Rome, Genoa and Milan. Then back to the USA in 1987, where I spoke at The Sixteenth Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 1750-1850, at Florida State University, on "The Achievement of Pasquale Paoli and its Consequences", at the invitation of Professor Harold T. Parker, who became my guide, adviser and friend.

By then I had already presented Paoli's constitution in The English Historical Review (1973), in the Corsican learned review, the Bulletin de la Societe des Sciences Historiques et Naturelles de la Corse (1976) in extenso, and in the Annales Historiques de la Revolution Francaise, in an issue devoted to Corsica, with the title La Corse Des Lumieres a la Revolution, (Paris, 1974; Ajaccio, 1979). I was responsible for preparing this issue at the invitation of the editor, the late Professor Albert Soboul, an outstanding authority on the French Revolution.

I met Soboul by one of those accidental happenings that have determined my life, at a little colloque organized in Ajaccio in 1969 to celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of Napoleon. Pierre Lamotte encouraged me to make a contribution; another kind friend, John McErlean (a British professor working at York University, Toronto), communicated to me some unpublished memoirs of Charles-Andre Pozzo di Borgo, a Corsican friend of Napoleon's youth who later became his implacable enemy. This was an extremely generous gesture, because Pozzo di Borgo is McErlean's special subject, which he has treated extensively in his recent book Napoleon and Pozzo di Borgo ... not quite a Vendetta (Edwin Mellen Press, 1996).

McErlean's documents enabled me to make an adequate communication at the colloque in Ajaccio in 1969. It attracted the interest of Albert Soboul, who had come to preside at the meeting. He became a most valued friend and adviser, lending me his flat in Paris when he was on his summer holidays, and so greatly facilitating my researches at the Archives Nationales and the libraries. He also encouraged and guided my researches in Corsican history in the Public Record Office in London, where I found numerous unpublished letters by Paoli; the resulting book appeared in Ajaccio in 1983. Though he never made any direct comment on my work, by his example, and his conversation, Soboul made me aware of the rigorous methods of historical research: that every statement must be justified by the citation of a contemporary source, and that every source must be tested for its validity. These principles were to prove of very great assistance to me in my work on Napoleon.

Professor Harold T. Parker, foremost American Napoleonic scholar, I met by chance in Ajaccio when he was visiting the town to collect material on his subject. It was not yet mine. When I came to Corsica I had not planned to make any special study of Napoleon; too many much better qualified people, I felt, had already done so, and I did not suppose I could usefully add to the some 22,000 books and articles which, so I was told, had already been published on the Corsican hero.

I had concentrated on other, earlier, Corsican heroes: the nameless prehistoric warriors carved from the granite at Filitosa, and then Pasquale Paoli, the liberator, known as "Father of the Nation", a man of the 18th Century Enlightenment. It was of him mainly, that I spoke when Professor Parker afforded me the wonderful opportunity of contributing to a session of the Consortium at Florida State in 1986.

Captured by Napoleon

But I had already been captured by Napoleon. Less by anything I had heard from the specialists of that period, but by catching sight of a document at an exhibition in Paris in 1969 in the National Archives, on "Napoleon tel qu'en lui-meme" [Napoleon such as he is]. I can say that this document changed my life. It was a letter written by Letizia Bonaparte, ordering a wardrobe of smart clothes. I noticed the date: 13 March, 1769. This was precisely the period when Corsican independence was threatened by French invasion, and Paoli was calling on every man and boy able to hold a gun. But how could it be that this austere, heroic woman, mother of Joseph and already six months pregnant with Napoleon, should indulge in clothes at such a time?

She was then living with her husband at Corte, close to the residence of Paoli in his grim mountain fortress capital. Pietrasanta was in Bastia, a day's journey away, and was already collaborating with the French enemy. The letter was altogether contrary to the image of Letizia handed down by historians. But was that image correct? The letter offered contradictory evidence. I thereupon determined to examine it more closely. I noted that it belonged to Prince Louis Napoleon, the present head of the Bonaparte family. How was I to see it? How was I to meet the Prince?

After some cogitation I ventured to appeal to the Duchess Pozzo de Borgo, who had already kindly received me in the Pozzo de Borgo family homes in Corsica and in Paris. I was not very hopeful, in view of the Bonaparte-Pozzo de Borgo feud I had learned about from our mutual friend John McErlean. But I soon discovered, to my delight, that the quarrel had been overcome.

The Duchess arranged for me to be received by the Prince and Princess Napoleon at their residence in Switzerland. And there I enjoyed the inestimable privilege of perusing the Prince's archives. The documents have since been deposited in the Archives Nationales, in Paris; but any researcher will appreciate the difference between peering at a document on a micro-film and holding it in one's hand, when it seems literally to come alive.

So I read and handled Letizia's letter. And many others, unpublished, written by her and her husband, which give a picture of this astute, ambitious couple very different from that I had derived from history books. I decided, with some trepidation, to enter the field of Napoleonic research.

I secured a contract with a London publisher. I scoured the archives and libraries in Corsica and Paris; I tracked down a childhood drawing by Napoleon in the Bibliotheca Mediceana Laurenziana in Florence. The building and environment impressed me by their beauty; Napoleon's drawing did not: a small unskillful sketch of a typical traditional Corsican house, with a pitched roof and exterior staircase. A poor person's home: did Napoleon choose to draw it because it was so much less handsome than the house in Ajaccio where he was born? But it moved me, and I was pleased that the publisher agreed to include it among the illustrations to my book Napoleon and his Parents: on the Threshold of History (London: Viking Press, 1988).

In 1990 it was published in New York by Dutton, and in 1993 it received the prize of the American Napoleonic Society. A delegation came to Corsica to present it to me; this took place in the Town Hall of Ajaccio, beneath a grandiose portrait of Napoleon in his coronation robes by Gerard. That same year it was published in a French translation in Ajaccio by Alain Piazzola.

Though my Granite Island had been published in French in 1990 by Arthaud, in Paris, no Parisian publisher wanted my Napoleon, even though a leading scholar on that period, the late Professor Jacques Godechot, whom I had met with Albert Soboul, kindly wrote some flattering notes on the book. British scholarship, I was told by Parisian friends, was suspect in Paris: work coming from Corsica did not inspire much confidence. "It's the combination of perfide Albion and perfide Corse [treacherous England and treacherous Corsica] that has weighted against you", an erudite acquaintance said to me. Yet in spite of these handicaps a most distinguished French Napoleonic scholar, Professor Jean Tulard, invited me in 1990 to give a lecture at the Sorbonne; its title was "La premiere ascension sociale des Bonaparte". It was subsequently published in the Revue de l'Institut Napoleon.

Historian

So it happened, by a sequence of unexpected events, and meetings with leading historians who took interest in my work, that I became myself a historian. All this took place between 1968 and 1986: what I might call the crucial years of my life. Who said one could only learn when young? Nonsense! I have described myself as "self-taught", but in fact I have had wonderful teachers: the archivist Pierre Lamotte, little known as a historian but the author of remarkable studies in the Corsican learned journals, Professors John McErlean, John Grenville, Albert Soboul, Jacques Godechot, Jean Tulard, Harold T. Parker; all men of high renown.

Never could I have met such an assembly in any one university, and their help, guidance and advice more than compensated me for my disappointments at Oxford. And I do not forget the friends in England who have encouraged and advised me: Professor Helli Koenigsberger, a historian of international repute who masters half-a-dozen languages, and his brilliant wife whose subject is "the history of thought"; and John Rogister, of Durham University.

My sincere thanks are also due to a Corsican historical writer who has not undertaken a university career, Xavier Versini, author of the sole (to my knowledge) biography of Napoleon's father, Charles Bonaparte. His carefully written work, abundantly documented from the Corsican archives, does much to correct the traditional image of Charles propagated by previous historians: that of a spendthrift, frivolous, scheming, unscrupulous arriviste husband of an austere, saintly woman. Saintly neither of them was. Both were scheming and arriviste: characteristics understandable and not really so reprehensible in an impecunious young couple, living in an under-developed, peripheral, recently-conquered province of France, and bent on giving their eight children a favorable start in life. Who can blame them?

I have already written, and I state again, that if ever a man deserved to have such a son as Napoleon it was Charles Bonaparte. And if ever a son merited such a father it was Napoleon. But alas for historical records! Napoleon's passionate love-hate attachment to his mother blinded him to what he owed to his father, on whom he never publicly bestowed a word of thanks. Xavier Versini, presenting another picture, gave me valuable indications for the preparation of my book on Napoleon.

Since then I have written a work offering a diametrically contrary vision of Corsica: The Dream-Hunters of Corsica (US reprint by Trafalgar Square Publishers, 1997) [see review on page 46], an account of esoteric beliefs and practices dating from a deep past, and still current in the island.

I had first heard of these things from Jean Cesari when I first came to Corsica. He spoke to me of many mysteries: the signs and sounds that give warning of death; the people who predict death, the mazzeri, men and women who dream they go hunting by night, wild and domestic animals. When they kill an animal they roll it onto its back, and recognize in its face someone they know in their village, who may even be a member of their own family. The next day they announce what they have seen, and the person so designated invariably dies within a year.

I recalled, in my book, amazing experiences. The day, for instance, when Jean introduced me to a woman mazzeri; not at all the sinister old witch I had been expecting, but a handsome, inspired woman who spoke in rhythmic, chanting tones, as the sibyls must have spoken, I thought, in the time of Antiquity. He also took me to a signadora, one of the women who dispel the influence of the Evil Eye by elaborate rites with oil and water and secret incantations, Christianized versions of rites no doubt more ancient. Today, while the mazzeri are dwindling in numbers, signadori, men and women, are still practicing in the villages.

I was hesitant in publishing this book. I feared it might demolish whatever reputation I might have gained as a historian; that its contents might be dismissed as "superstitious nonsense", even if for me a superstition is never nonsense, but precious evidence concerning the roots of a given culture. But no: the book was well received in London (released there in 1995) and the USA, attracting serious reviews.

I have indeed many reasons to feel delighted. Starting in semi-ignorance, I have written about the aspects of Corsica that have fascinated me; my books have won prizes; I have been rewarded with various totally unexpected honors, as recently, when in 1996 I was awarded the MBE [Member of the British Empire] by the British government for my work on Corsica as "ethnologist and historian".

And now, just a few days ago, I have received news of another honor which might arouse mirth were it not so valuable: an elderly British historian, I have been chosen as the Napoleonic expert in Corsica to lecture on Napoleon's childhood, when a cruise ship, the Napoleon Bonaparte, calls at Ajaccio next June [now past] in the course of a cruise.

Yes: privilege I have achieved: so different from the artificial sterile privileges of my youth in Gloucestershire. And I am grateful. Grateful too, to be able to look back on the varied and stimulating experiences of my life in Corsica, and the journeys, not without excitement, to distant lands offered to me by my work in this off-the-beaten-track island. As one who felt cramped by the Oxford routine, this travel has been particularly welcome. Although living on an island, I have not been isolated.

So I have always been happy to return to my little flat in Ajaccio, now a flat on a ground floor, where the sun pours into a room opening onto a garden with mandarin trees that bear fruit nearly all the year round. I have been interviewed there by Corsican, continental French, English, German, and international media. My Granite Island is still circulating in Penguin edition, and I am immensely pleased and proud to be asked for this record by Dr. June Burton.

Though I have long ago reached retiring age, I am fully occupied. I recently translated into English the first chapters of a most interesting book by Dr. Francois Paoli, Le Docteur Antonmarchi ou le Secret du Masque de Napoleon [Dr. Antonmarchi or the Secret of the Deathmask of Napoleon] (Paris, Edisud). If, as I very much hope, it finds publishers in England and/or USA, I look forward to completing the translation. In the meantime I am taking steps to have published for the first time some most revealing documents on the Bonaparte family communicated to me by Prince Louis Napoleon, with translations and commentaries. If this is written and published, I might then try my hand at brief biographies of some of the really extraordinary people, of different nationalities, whom I have met on this magic island. I have been offered a good contract by an English publisher to write an autobiography, but I think I have written enough about myself here.

More Carrington:

Napoleon and Corsica
Napoleon's Corsica: Photos
Napoleon's Attitudes Toward Popular Corsican Beliefs

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