Louisa Dixie Durrell

Who was Louisa Dixie Durrell?

Louisa Dixie Durrell, born Louisa Florence Dixie was the mother of novelist Lawrence Durrell and naturalist Gerald Durrell. She is perhaps best remembered as the character of "Mother" in the Gerald Durrell's autobiographical Corfu trilogy.

She was born to an Irish Protestant family in Roorkee, India in 1886 where she met and married her husband Lawrence Samuel Durrell, an engineer by profession. Together, they travelled all over India on account of Lawrence's engineering work.

She had four surviving children - Lawrence, Leslie, Margaret and Gerald.

Louise was actively interested in spiritualism and cookery, and would mingle with Indians to learn of local spirits and cuisine, not conforming to the views of segregation of her time.

On the death of her husband in 1928 she decided to move her family to England, and in 1935 she moved again with her children and Lawrence's then wife Nancy to Corfu. It is here that she is portrayed by Gerald Durrell as the family's well-meaning but slightly eccentric matriarch in the Corfu trilogy - My Family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts and Relatives and The Garden of the Gods.