Written out of Revenge

Rosemary Hill

• BuyLove’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen & Charles Ritchie Letters and Diaries 1941-73 edited by Victoria Glendinning, with Judith Robertson
  Simon and Schuster, 489 pp, £14.99, February 2009, ISBN 978 1 84737 213 0
• BuyPeople, Places, Things: Essays by Elizabeth Bowen edited by Allan Hepburn
  Edinburgh, 467 pp, £60.00, November 2008, ISBN 978 0 7486 3568 9

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.