Memoirist, novelist, editor extraordinaire, Diana Athill has been a mainstay of literary London for something like seven decades. Now, at ninety-eight years of age, she has become one of those people whose notoriety derives simply from not being dead—from still being, according to the title of her most recent memoir, Alive, Alive Oh! Ms. Athill is possibly the very last English author who can remember the 1920s clearly and write about that lost era with grace. Her descriptions of Ditchingham Hall, her grandparents’ Georgian house in Norfolk, are permeated with the sense of a lost arcadia we often find in Britons who can remember that time before world depression, fascism, World War II, and the welfare state changed their island forever. Athill’s grandparents had inherited this beautiful estate from ancestors who imagined that the environment they had created might endure indefinitely.

The Cedar Walk had been planned and planted by someone who was never going to see it—not him, nor his children, nor even his children’s children, though they would have had a clearer view of what it was going to be. What amazingly generous confidence in the future those eighteenth-century landscape designers had! . . . We children, when we stalked each other, birds’-nested, climbed trees, dammed the stream or just idled in the Cedar Walk, were inhabiting a two-hundred-year-old dream: a place planned to support not only its inhabitants’ bodies, but also their minds—perhaps even their souls.

While Athill continues to mourn Ditchingham Hall