The life of the heart

Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, Letters and Diaries from the Love Affair of a Lifetime edited by Victoria Glendinning, with Judith Roberts

It is probable that the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) was a virgin ten years after her marriage to Alan Cameron, the retired Secretary to the Central Council of School Broadcasting at the BBC. Victoria Glendinning tells us that ‘their alliance was always close — but companionable, not sexual.’ But then she began to have affairs: with the Irish writer Sean O’Faolain, and with Humphrey House, a young Oxford don; a lesbian relationship with May Santon, the Belgian-American poet; and a brief liaison with Goronwy Rees, a journalist and spy who abruptly left her for the novelist Rosamond Lehmann.

When, in the depths of the second world war, she met the young Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie (1906-1995) she had been married for 18 years and had become ‘increasingly recognised as one of the most important and best-loved British women novelists of the first half of the 20th century’.