Durrell visited PGH in her island home on Mykonos in the summer of 1963, when they were collaborating on her adaptation of his verse drama Sappho. Like him she was obsessed with islands. She visited many of the Greek ones—36 of them before she bought the house on Mykonos—but strangely there is little record of her visiting any more as a tourist after that. She did visit Lesbos during her researches on Sappho, and Chios to see Jani Christou, but there is no record to suggest she visited Santorini, the subject of a poem by Seferis that she admired. The one exception though was Delos, which was for her a sacred place. She sailed there in a caïque many times, one of them with Durrell and his wife Claude in 1963.
There are people who find islands somehow irresistible.
— Durrell Society (@DurrellSociety) June 4, 2020
The mere knowledge that they are on an island, a little world surrounded by the sea, fills them with an indescribable intoxication.
— Lawrence Durrell on #islomanes#islomania
Ortelius (1584) pic.twitter.com/avcbXBeFr6
