Love, Loyalty and Deceit

Rosemary Firth, a Life in the Shadow of Two Eminent Men

Hugh Firth, Loulou Brown

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781800739789, 9781800739765
• eBook ISBN: 9781800739772
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

How much do we really know about our parents' lives? What secrets lie in plain sight? This is the true story of hidden love within a small circle of some of the most acclaimed anthropologists of the 20th century.

Told by Rosemary and Raymond Firth's son, and the daughter of Celia and Edmund Leach, the man Rosemary loved all her life, this part love-story, part biography, part social history is the tale of a highly influential circle of social anthropologists in Britain from the 1930s, through the Second World War, to the end of the century.

The book explores their early influences, their insecurities, their flaws, struggles and achievements. It is a story of passion and commitment, but also of deceit and betrayal, including the inexplicable disappearance, death and alleged murder of a very close friend. It also narrates Rosemary's struggles for emotional and intellectual independence in the face of societal expectations of women and her own guilt, loss and self-doubt.

From the Prologue:
Rosemary loved many people in many different ways, but she loved two men in particular throughout most of her life. One was her husband, Raymond Firth, regarded by some as among the founding fathers of social anthropology. Yet she also retained a passionate devotion to her first love, Edmund Leach, who would subsequently become the public intellectual face of social anthropology in the later 1960s. Both separately and together they were part of the process of defining the nature of this still growing discipline in the first part of the mid-twentieth century.

Table of contents

• Love, Loyalty and Deceit
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Important People
• Chronology
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Edmund
• Chapter 2. I Know He Will Come Back
• Chapter 3. A Proposal
• Chapter 4. Raymond
• Chapter 5. Except by the Trickery of Cunning Fate
• Chapter 6. Have You Been Bombed?
• Chapter 7. Under Attack
• Chapter 8. Opened by Censor
• Chapter 9. One Suit and Two Blouses
• Chapter 10. Clogs, Cotton, Commerce and Cream
• Chapter 11. Twenty Hens, Three Cats and a Fish
• Chapter 12. The Cost of Change
• Chapter 13. Goblins
• Chapter 14. Dancing Days and Orchid Nights
• Chapter 15. Bursting with Ideas
• Chapter 16. Scorched Earth
• Chapter 17. The Wheel Keeps Turning
• Chapter 18. Together Again
• Chapter 19. Only by Change Can Things Not Die
• Chapter 20. The Dark Side of the Moon
• Chapter 21. Knowing Too Much and Too Little
• Chapter 22. Pity Bolts Other Doors
• Chapter 23. Almost Like Brothers
• Chapter 24. Who Was That Woman?
• Selected Bibliography
• Index