Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard Artists

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By the time she was 14, her anorexia had made her too ill to attend. “I was effectively put on mandatory bed leave.” Her recovery was slow and, at times, painful and The Reading Cure does not shy away from admitting that certain foods are still difficult. Not even the siren song of Joanne Harris’s Chocolat could convince her to embrace confectionery. As Freeman puts it so well, “he was a man who made a difference”, a modest epitaph perhaps, but enough.

Jim the collector was a terrific character. However reading between the lines, his restless networking which was so engaging when he was young, I quite see must have been irritating in his old age. You can understand why Henry Moore began to feel hunted. Sassoon’s vivid descriptions of eggs on buttered toast, and hot chocolate, made her think that there was “a different way of eating … one that was less mean and more adventurous”. Encouraged by this notion, she began to hunt down other authors who wrote vividly about food. MB: I enjoyed being introduced to the quirks of Jim’s life, such as proposing to his wife Helen at Heal’s on Tottenham Court Road, and making time to paint on the morning of his wedding. In the 1950s, Jim Ede came to Cambridge to look for a stately home that he and his wife Helen could move into with their amazing art collection.It is an extraordinary tale and could not have been told better or with more sensitivity. Her book will make anyone want to pay an immediate visit” ― Literary Review

Ways of Life is a portable Kettle's Yard, an entrancing book of immense and curious beauty -- Ruth Scurr, author of Fatal Purity In this first biography of the Kettle's Yard artists, Laura Freeman reveals the life of a visionary who helped shape twentieth-century British art Helen Ede was a good piano player, although she was very modest, to entertain them. They never really had much money. The joke that used to go around was that you had better eat dinner before you go up to the Edes’ because you only get two strawberries or two berries on a plate. And Jim said that they could never really afford to give them proper wine so they would serve ginger wine. But I would have liked to have been at those parties. That would have been good fun.”

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The beautiful, revelatory biography of Jim Ede and Kettle's Yard that we have been waiting for. I loved it” ― Edmund de Waal Freeman has done a wonderful job here in conveying with absolute precision why Ede mattered and what made him different from his Bloomsbury contemporaries * Sunday Times *

And some of his most passionate pleas fell on deaf ears at the Tate, especially in the case of Van Gogh.

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He might have allowed himself to be gay. I think his marriage to Helen was very long, very devoted, very happy, but I think it might not have been the primary relationship he might have wished for. The beautiful, revelatory biography of Jim Ede and Kettle's Yard that we have been waiting for. I loved it Edmund de Waal