Into the Sunshine

In 1906 Edith spent three months in Provence learning the language and collecting “copy” for her fourth novel, The Golden Hawk (1907). The stay also gave rise to three published stories, some sketches, a proposed translation of Joseph Roumanille’s Contes Provençaux, and, based on letters given her by a man “under a magnolia tree,” her unpublished “Letters to a Lover.” Stopping in Lyons on her return to England she also transcribed “La Belle Helaine de Constantinople,” a work related to Emaré that she hoped to edit. But in winter 1906–1907 she was seemingly in and out of the London Homeopathic Hospital. Whatever the case, she had recovered enough by July to join Salmon for a two-and-a-half week “whirl” around Denmark and Sweden. She then made her way to Skagen for a visit that she wouldn’t have missed “for anything—anything.”