Rosemary Hill writes:

Civil war is an unpleasant business and the story that unfolds in the letters and diaries of Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, the Canadian diplomat with whom she was in love for more than thirty years, is not a happy one. This was not so much what the publishers are pleased to call on the dust jacket ‘the love affair of a lifetime’, more like a fight to the death. Not that theirs was a tempestuous relationship in the usual sense. There were occasional scenes and some quarrels, but not, apparently, many. The struggle was between two complex and internally divided natures at war with themselves as much as with each other and constrained by circumstances largely of their own making. After her death Ritchie destroyed his letters to Bowen and some of hers to him. We are left, therefore, with her remaining letters and his diaries: she talks to him and he talks to himself. Like two soliloquists just within earshot of one another they seem sometimes to fall into dialogue and at others to be taking part in completely different dramas.

(LRB 9 April 2009)

The Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie first met in London in 1941 and conducted a passionate love affair for the following three decades, despite seldom being in the same country or even on the same continent. The affair was sustained principally by correspondence, and from a sadly partial record (Ritchie destroyed all of his letters to Bowen when they were returned to him after her death) Victoria Glendinning reconstructs the story of an unequal love, played out against the glittering backdrop of London high society.

Simon and Schuster | hardback 489 pp. |ISBN: 9781847372130