My Family and Other Animals

In 1935, the Durrell family — eccentric mother, four children including a ten-year-old Gerald and his older novelist brother Lawrence — abandoned England for the Greek island of Corfu, where they lived for five years in a succession of villas with a changing cast of tutors, servants, and neighbours. For Gerald, the youngest, it was five years of almost entirely unsupervised immersion in the wildlife of one of the most species-rich corners of the Mediterranean.

My Family and Other Animals (1956) is his account of this childhood paradise, written twenty years later with the double vision of someone who remembers both the child’s-eye wonder and the naturalist’s subsequent knowledge. The wildlife chapters are organised around the creatures Gerald collected, studied, and occasionally drove his family to distraction with: scorpions in matchboxes, octopuses in the bath, a Scops owl named Ulysses, a collection of snakes that escaped with some regularity. The natural history is accurate — Durrell went on to found the Jersey Zoo and was a serious conservation biologist — but it is presented with a comic lightness that never sacrifices precision.

Corfu in the 1930s is rendered with the particularity that only a child’s complete attention could achieve: the quality of the light, the smell of the olive groves, the specific call of particular birds, the textures of particular beaches. The island itself becomes one of the book’s characters, as vivid as brother Lawrence (pompous, literary, somewhat alarmed by the fauna), sister Margo (boy-obsessed, frequently sunburned), and the mother who presides over the chaos with an unruffled willingness to accommodate whatever creature or lunatic her youngest has brought home.

The BBC television adaptations — The Durrells (2016–2019) — introduced a new generation to the story; the book, typically, is considerably funnier and stranger than any adaptation could manage.

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The Natural History

The wildlife chapters are the beating heart of the book, and they reward readers who attend to them as seriously as Durrell attended to the creatures themselves. His scorpions are not comic props but observed animals: he watches them hunt, moult, and carry their young on their backs, recording behaviour with the accuracy of the field naturalist he was becoming. The Scops owl Ulysses, the magpies, the rose-beetle the family’s maid inadvertently releases into the dining room — each episode is precise about the animal’s actual biology while simultaneously being about something larger: the particular quality of a child’s attention when it is wholly, unselfconsciously given.

Durrell was born in 1925 in Jamshedpur, India, the youngest of four children. His older brother Lawrence was already a published poet when the family arrived on Corfu in 1935, and their mother — widowed and cheerfully adrift — allowed Gerald the freedom that only a distracted household and a sun-drenched island together could provide. He had no formal schooling to speak of, a succession of tutors who arrived enthusiastic and departed exhausted, and five years in one of the most species-rich corners of the Mediterranean to pursue his obsession. What he turned that obsession into, twenty years later, is this book.

The Comedy of Family Life

The family scenes are a study in benevolent chaos. Lawrence, occupying whichever villa had the best light and the greatest distance from his siblings’ animals, writes novels and dispenses literary opinions. Leslie shoots things. Margo pursues health cures and then young men. Their mother cooks, hosts, worries modestly, and displays a remarkable willingness to share her house with whatever creature Gerald has brought in from the hillsides. The comedy is never malicious — Durrell loves his family even when lampooning them — and the portraits are affectionate enough that the real originals, when interviewed decades later, confirmed the accuracy while forgiving the embellishments.

The Greek characters — the family’s various landlords, their polymath friend Theodore Stephanides, the peasants who appear in the wildlife chapters — are rendered with the same warm attention Durrell gave to the animals. Theodore in particular, who introduced Gerald to taxonomy and scientific method, is one of the book’s great characters: learned, precise, dry, endlessly patient with the questions of a ten-year-old who wanted to know everything.

Why It Endures

My Family and Other Animals was published in 1956, when Durrell was thirty-one and the Jersey Zoo — which he founded three years later in 1959 — was still a project in formation. The book’s success funded the zoo and launched the writing career that would run parallel to his conservation work for the rest of his life. It has never been out of print. The ITV and PBS adaptation The Durrells in Corfu (2016-2019) introduced the story to a new generation, but the book, which is funnier, stranger, and more informative than any television version could manage, continues to find its own readers.

What makes it endure is not merely the comedy or the natural history but the combination: the demonstration that precise observation and genuine delight are not in tension, that the most accurate way to describe the living world is also, often, the most joyful. Durrell spent the rest of his career making that argument. He made it first, and best, here.

The Corfu Years

My Family and Other Animals (1956) recounts the five years (1935–1939) the young Gerald Durrell spent on the Greek island of Corfu, where his boyhood obsession with the local wildlife unfolds alongside the comic chaos of his eccentric family. The first and best-loved of his “Corfu trilogy,” it later became the basis for the popular ITV/PBS series The Durrells.