Editorial Reviews:
In the first volume of her autobiography, The Sun in the Morning, M.M. Kaye detailed the first eighteen years of her life in India and England and introduced readers to her love affair with India. She brought to life its people, scents, vibrant colors, and breathtaking landscapes. In the second volume, Golden Afternoon, she happily returned to her beloved India after years in a British boarding school. New to the glories of the Delhi social season, M.M. Kaye recounted her delightful exploits as a vivacious young woman in Raj society.
Now, in Enchanted Evening, M.M. Kaye is a young woman forced to leave her cherished home in India when her father takes a new post in china. Though at first disoriented by the unfamiliar customs and confusing protocol of her new surroundings, it is in China that she discovers the pleasures that come from independence. Coming into her own as a painter, Kaye first meets with artistic success in China and then moves to cramped quarters in London's South Kensington neighborhood, where she begins to flourish as a writer.
With vivid descriptions and the wisdom that comes with age, M.M. Kaye looks back on the years she spent as a young woman in a world as yet unmarked by World War II's devastation.
The third volume of M.M. Kaye's memoirs continues the story of her life in the engagingly chatty style that is familiar from The Sun in the Morning and Golden Afternoon. As this volume begins, Kaye is a young woman in her 20s, apprehensively en route to China in the spring of 1932. She would have preferred to remain in India, her childhood home (and the setting, many years later, for her bestselling novel The Far Pavilions), but her beloved father, who has been dismissed unfairly from the British colonial service, wants to retire in China. Kaye's account of the family's sojourn is colorful and often quite funny, but the mood darkens when they return to India for younger sister Bet's wedding and their father dies shortly thereafter. Kaye goes to England, planning to support herself as an illustrator, but stumbles instead into a career writing mysteries and children's books. The self-effacing author presents this turn of events as a simple stroke of luck, and devotes most of her text to amusing anecdotes and evocative descriptions of landscape, particularly after royalty payments enable her to return happily to India. In the privileged British Raj, politics hardly impinge until World War II begins in 1939, and this ill wind blows good toward our redoubtable heroine, who meets Mr. Right in the shape of an Indian Army officer who is escaping a bad marriage. Even here, Kaye is oh-so-English in her assertion that Lieutenant Godfrey John Hamilton was "only too ready to fall into the arms of almost any unattached woman.... I can only be profoundly and eternally grateful that she happened to be me." The warm humanism and ready wit that are displayed throughout these charming reminiscences will prompt most readers to feel that Lieutenant Hamilton was the lucky one. --Wendy Smith
Customer Reviews:
 Enchanted Evening
LOVED it!!!! I enjoyed everything Ms. Kaye wrote about India and that includes her three volume autobiography. It is a shame that she started this books so late and never gave us the rest of her amazing life: back to the UK, traveling with her husband through the 1950s and 60s when she wrote her "Death in...." series. So many things her fans would have liked to know.  The third and hopefully not last volume of the series!
...or perhaps this should be subtitled - in which Mollie searches for Mr Right. This is the third volume of MM Kayes hugely enjoyable and readable autobiographies - and they are of her childhood - and in the case of this, the third volume, her young adulthood in India. Yet this book ends in 1939 with the world on the brink of war and India still almost a decade away from independence.Mollie's world is still that of the Raj, the privilege and the society of exiled Englishmen and women who have literally transposed their lives to another country but hugely interesting to read - and funny. MM Kaye is an excellent observationalist and writer - India in all its colours and textures comes alive under her pen. Also her search - or rather perhaps her family's search for a Mr Right to take her off the shelf and (according to her sister-in-law) off their hands. I very much hope this is not the final volume of her book because MM Kaye (last I heard) was still alive and so ending her autobiographies in 1939 when there is such a huge amount of her life left to cover would be a travesty. She didn't even publish her first epic novel until the late 1950's although her mysteries were being written at this early stage. MM Kaye is such a good writer this may be the perfect way to meet her - through her autobiographies. Enchanting is the Right Word!
Am enjoying this third part of M.M.Kaye's autobiography as much as the previous two--maybe more! Her description of the death of her father so mirrors my own, I was reminded of my sister's statement that "nothing ever turns out the way one thinks it will." Ms. Kaye has such a way with description and words, and it is fascinating to read of these last days in countries like China, Japan and India that were irrevocably changed by WWII. I hope there will be a Part IV!! I am filled with a longing for these seemingly gentler times, even though I was born long after they were already a memory to Ms. Kaye. Light, fun to read, and fascinating.
I just finished Enchanted Evening, and I liked it as much as I've liked all of M. M. Kaye's work. Although not well off financially, she and her family lived in India and China during what seemed like a fun period for women of the English upper classes -- not much to do besides attend parties, travel to exotic locales, and search for a suitable husband. Her stories of the good times she had, plus how she began to support herself with her art and with writing, were a very welcome distraction to me. I am looking forward to reading the next one.
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(4 reviews)
