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Oct 20, 2009 | ISBN 9780771035685 Buy
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Oct 20, 2009 | ISBN 9780771035685
National bestseller and a Globe and Mail Best BookThe passionate, life-long love affair between two magicians of the written word. The Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie met at a christening in London, England, in 1941; shortly afterward they embarked on a love affair that lasted until her death in 1973. At the time they met, she was married, but Ritchie quickly became her whole life, although she remained committed to the loving but sexually unfulfilling life with her husband. When Ritchie realized that she would never divorce, he eventually married too — wedding his cousin Sylvia in 1948. In a terrible twist of fate, Bowen’s husband died just a few years later. Most of the time the lovers were apart, snatching a few days together when they could. But they wrote constantly to each other, letters in which she poured out her heart to him about their affair, about her money troubles, about friends, politics, and literature, and Ritchie kept every letter she wrote. His own letters to her have not survived, but he wrote candidly about her and his conflicted feelings for her in his diaries, diaries that were heavily edited for the four volumes that have been published. Ritchie died in 1995.
Victoria Glendinning is the Whitbread Award-winning biographer of Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell, Vita Sackville-West, Rebecca West, and Jonathan Swift. Her novels, The Grown-Ups, Electricity, and Flight, were critical and commercial successes. She lives in London, England.
“Mesmerizing…. Deeply moving.”— Globe and Mail“Contradicts everything we know about love.”— Literary Review of Canada“These gorgeously expressed letters and vivid, self-revealing diary entries bring to life a whole vanished world.”— Jane Urquhart“Surprising, engrossing….”— National Post
Editor’s Introduction Editor’s Note on the Text Acknowledgements Part One1941- 1952 Part Two1953- 1958 Part Three1959- 1973 Index
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