Love's Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie: Letters and Diaries 1941-1973

by Victoria Glendinning (Editor), Judith Robertson (Primary Contributor)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2009

  $3.38

  The love affair between the writer Elizabeth Bowen and the elegant and charming Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie blossomed quickly after their first meeting in 1941 and continued over the next three decades until Bowen's death in 1973. Theirs was a passion that flourished in the heightened, dangerous atmosphere of wartime London that Bowen wrote about so vividly in her novels. When Ritchie's diplomatic career took him further afield -- to Paris, Bonn, New York and Ottawa -- the lovers wrote to one another continuously, sharing their hopes and fears, their boundless affection for one another, and their longing to be together again. Published for the first time in this exquisite volume, accompanied by extracts from Ritchie's remarkably candid diaries, the love letters of Elizabeth Bowen reveal a passionate, intelligent, eloquent, strong-minded and wonderfully funny woman. They also reveal a man bewitched by her writer's mind and imagination, and by her adoring vision of him as a greater man than he ever felt himself to be.

• Used

  Paperback
  2010

  $4.59

  The love affair between the celebrated writer Elizabeth Bowen and the elegant and charming Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie blossomed quickly after their first meeting in 1941 and continued over the next three decades until Bowen's death. Published for the first time, accompanied by extracts from Ritchie's remarkably candid diaries, the love letters of Elizabeth Bowen reveal an intelligent, passionate and wonderfully funny woman. In her letters and his diaries we hear the lovers' voices. Set against an ever-changing backdrop, from the Second World War to the Swinging Sixties, and featuring a glorious cast of socialites, writers and politicians, including Nancy Mitford, Iris Murdoch, Isaiah Berlin and John F Kennedy, Love's Civil War is at once a fascinating and intimate portrait of a great love that endures distance, circumstance and time.