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’. Ritchie was unmarried, seven years younger than her, ‘something of a philanderer’, and working in London as Second Secretary at the Canadian High Commission. She was 42, an Anglican, and loyal to the institution of marriage. Divorce was never contemplated. They met at a christening in 1941. Ritchie’s diary entry notes:

She seems all romance and girlish seriousness. It can’t be all bluff — and yet … She is acute as a razor blade and about as merciful … she is a witch, that’s what it is. In the first place, how can a woman of 40 with gold bangles and the face of a woman of 40 and the air of a don’s wife, how can such a woman have such a body — like Donatello’s David I told her when I first saw what it was like. Those small firm breasts, that modelled neck set with such beauty on her shoulders, that magnificent back … would I ever have fallen for her if it hadn’t been for her books?

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP