---

Worlds Apart

Margaret Moncrieff (Helen McClelland)
2003, 258pp (large format) ISBN 978 09524680 7 3
£19.99 (includes p&p in the UK)

Memoirs of the worlds of family, music, and of course girls’ school stories, from Elinor M. Brent-Dyer’s biographer and the author of Visitors for the Chalet School and Time and Again.

Margaret Moncrieff Kelly has a wide reputation as a cellist, both performer and teacher, and is also well known in the world of schoolgirl fiction as the writer and biographer Helen McClelland. The daughter of Lord Moncrieff, she was born in Edinburgh in the 1920s. She grew up in a strongly Protestant environment but was educated at convent schools, her parents both having converted to Roman Catholicism.

The socially restricted world of her early childhood was swept away by the 1939-45 war, and against all family traditions she chose to become a professional cellist, studying in Edinburgh, London and Paris, where she worked for over a year with Pierre Fournier. From 1952 she pursued a freelance career based in London, and in 1955 she joined a trio with the young Scottish pianist, Alexander Kelly, with whom she was to marry in 1957 and later to have two daughters.

Worlds Apart, covering memories of growing up in a vanished world and of living three different lives, is her seventh published book. A fascinating story of the life of a woman who has brought so many of us such pleasure.

"These autobiographical memoirs bring the author’s several worlds together with potency and charm."
- Mary Cadogan

"Fascinating to learn something about the background of a wonderful cellist
and colleague." - William ('Wibb') Bennett

"Such an interesting life, and she has the power to evoke it beautifully." - Rosemary Auchmuty

"A must for anyone interested in Scotland, music, books or social history. Her many different worlds are evocatively captured - sometimes almost painfully, though humour is seldom far away." - Iain Burnside

---

Return to Ju Gosling's Home Page