It was bad timing that Elizabeth Bowen’s husband, Alan Cameron, died in 1952, a mere three years after Ritchie married his cousin Sylvia Smellie. One wonders whether, had he waited, he might have married Bowen and enjoyed the same enduring love. A curiously revealing London diary entry for 8 May 1973 by Ritchie, after meeting Ian Fleming’s wife Ann at a party three months after Bowen’s death, may give us the answer:

We talked about E. I only remember what I said, and that under her modish cleverness I caught a trace of human affection and regret for E. More than I can say for Diana [Cooper] who was jealous of her and who will say that I am becoming a bore on the subject. She had got it wrong and insisted that Alan died before I was married. The implication being that I had been free to marry E. but had not done so. This is psychologically true. I doubt if I should have married her then, if she had been free; but it is chronologically false…

These fluent, entertaining letters and diary entries give an intimate insight into a remarkable love affair that survived the demands of a diplomatic career, separation and literary high-life in London and Ireland during a receding era.

Christopher Ondaatje is the author of Woolf in Ceylon and a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery.

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