“Peter, my dearest heart. Peter. Hello, love. You see? I did wait….”
Author’s Note
There are still a few old summer colonies left in Maine, places where for generations the same families have come each summer, to leave the present-day world behind and immerse themselves in an older, simpler one. The present world, however, has other ideas and leans close around these enclaves now, in many cases literally knocking on their doors. I have often felt that after this generation of elders is gone, there will be few left who remember what slow, sweet summers those in the old colonies were like. Families will still return, but the “real” world will come and go with them. This is inevitable, and on the whole, a substantial loss.
Retreat Colony does not exist, though in feeling it may perhaps come close to some of the older and more isolated ones Down East. Neither have I intended that any of the characters in this book have their counterparts in colony-goers anywhere, living or dead. The Chamblisses, the Potters, the Willises and their peers in Retreat exist only in my mind and heart, and now, I hope, in yours as well.
Cape Rosier does indeed exist, pretty much where I have set it, and is still, to my eyes, one of the wildest and most beautiful parts of the Maine coast, though that, too, is changing as developers discover what natives and summer people have known for a long time. As novelists are wont to do, I have changed some of the geography of the cape and surrounding territory, and moved some of its landmarks around, and relocated some of its roads and harbors, and even added a few of my own. But I hope lovers of this wild and lovely place will recognize the spirit and substance of it.
I am grateful to many people who have touched Colony in its making, either directly or indirectly. Some of them are:
Virginia Barber and Larry Ashmead, agent and editor, who cleared the jungle and laid the roadbed, as they always do…
Martha Gray, who processed these words and kept perfect track of many disparate threads…
Sunny Toulmin and Jane Hooper, who lovingly collected the memories of a score of members of our own Maine colony in one enchanting little book, from whose ambience I have borrowed liberally, if not its facts…
My friend Sue Dawson, beautiful in every way, whose memories of wartime colony summers I have appropriated and transmuted into Maude Chambliss’s…
Connie and Bill McCornick, gone now, who made Maine literally magical for me in so many ways…
My mother-in-law, Annalee Hagerman Siddons, who has loved being “at Maine” for sixty-five summers now, and passed that love along to me with both hands…and my husband Heyward, who took me there twenty-five summers ago and is, in that place as well as this, both anchor and wings.
Thanks and love to all of you.
ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
Atlanta, Georgia
January 5, 1992
About the Author
Anne Rivers Siddons has written fifteen bestselling novels, including Outer Banks, Colony, and Up Island, which are available from HarperCollins e-books.
Books by Anne Rivers Siddons
Homeplace
Peachtree Road
King's Oak
Outer Banks
Colony
Hill Towns
Downtown
Fault Lines
Up Island
Low Country
"Nora, Nora"
Islands
Sweetwater Creek
Praise for Anne Rivers Siddons
and
Colony
“Anne Rivers Siddons’s novels…pull you into the internal landscape of her characters’ lives and hold you there.”
People magazine
“Siddons draws precise, unforgettable portraits…read this, get lost in it.”
Cosmopolitan
“Siddons has always written well, but she emerges here as an elegant stylist…Don’t miss it.”
Newsday
“No matter how high the emotional mercury rises in your own summer, there is a cool breeze Down East…a world of old wealth, damask and cashmere, young love to luxuriate in.”
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Colony is a book to grab and not put down, to dream about and to savour. It’s highly recommended.”
Indianapolis Star
“Highly engaging…Excellent writing…a powerfully good read.”
Philadelphia Inquirer
“Anne Rivers Siddons at her best…Characters are memorably well-drawn and invite our involvement. Siddons has her readers feeling the salt spray, smelling low tide, hearing the applause after a successful regatta and seeing the aging matriarchs on their chairs at the Colony’s Yacht Club.”
Rocky Mountain News
“Written with a consummate grace.”
Detroit News
“Siddons again proves with Colony what a gifted storyteller she is.”
Oxford Review
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint: Excerpt from “Two Tramps In Mud Time” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem, copyright © 1963 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1964 by Lesley Frost, Ballantine. Copyright © 1969 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, Inc. Excerpt from “Ash Wednesday” in Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T.S. Eliot, Copyright © 1963 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., copyright © 1964, © 1963 by T. S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of the publisher.
COLONY. Copyright © 1992 by Anne Rivers Siddons. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition October 2003 ISBN: 978-0-061-74054-1
First HarperTorch paperback printing: December 2000
First HarperPaperbacks printing: July 1993
FirstHarperCollins hardcover printing: July 1992
30
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