
When Diana Athill, nearly forty-three and far from a household name, sat down to write Instead of a Letter, the first in her series of trailblazing memoirs, she was looking for an answer to the question "What have I lived for?" In this searching book, she recalls her child-hood...


Diana Athill's childhood was idyllic, brought up in the Norfolk countryside. Aged only fifteen, she fell in love with a young undergraduate. They travelled to Oxford, engaged to be married. Then everything fell apart in the cruellest possible way.

As a young woman, Diana Athill was engaged to an air force pilot--Instead of a Letter tells how he broke off the engagement, married someone else, and, worst of all, died overseas before she could confront or forgive him. Evoking perfectly the picturesque country setting of...





