Title: Odyssey of a liberal; memoirs
Description: Utley's memoirs begin with her childhood in London, focusing on her parents and their friends and intimates within the Fabian Socialist set including George Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Frank Harris, John Burns and T.W.H. Crossland. She describes her education at English and Swiss boarding schools and the cruelties she suffered for being "brainy." At London University she became one of the "Bohemian Left." Tutoring foreigners in English brought her into contact with Bolsheviks, whose views swayed her political beliefs and led her to join the Socialist Party. As Secretary of the King's College Socialist Society she met and began an enduring friendship with Bertrand Russell. For a time she resided with his family as tutor to his children. While visiting Russia she met her husband, Jewish economist Arkadi Berdichevsky, with whom she visited China and Japan. After their marriage they lived first in England, then in Russia, until he was arrested in 1936, sent to a labor camp, and ultimately executed in 1938. Her subsequent flight from Russia with her son Jon, and her disillusionment with the U.S.S.R., deeply affect her activities and writing, as she became an anticommunist (and ultimately a McCarthy supporter). In a later chapter she Utley describes her financial poverty but social affluence, living in Greenwich Village surrounded by friends such as Dwight MacDonald, Norman Cousins, Max Eastman, Sydney Hook, Norman Thomas, Granville Hicks, and Isaac Don Levine. She poignantly describes her attempts to discover the fate of her husband while struggling to survive by writing for a living. Throughout there are anecdotes about VlPs of the social and political worlds whose company she kept, told with the clarity and objectivity of a woman who understands people and politics. The book also contains hitherto unpublished correspondence between the author and Shaw and Russell. A planned second volume was never published.--Adapted from dust jacket and Wikipedia.
Subjects: Liberalism, Socialists, Biography