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The uncertainty continued after they returned to New York. “He leaves books, letters, a lock of hair, an Augustus John reproduction that looks like me—phone calls … He doesn’t know what he wants.” Shirley joined him in Connecticut on the first day of summer, they had lunch with his old high school …

Francis was at pains to explain his situation to her. Shirley summarised this later to Muriel:

A lot of remarks about not getting serious, I mustn’t think of this as love, etc. interspersed with displays of emotion, and passionate attention. I not knowing where I was in all this. Constant talk…

In New York, Shirley was deep in writing. She spent the weeks before leaving for Spain working frantically on The Evening of the Holiday, the first instalment of which had been scheduled for publication in The New Yorker the following month. At that stage it was still called “The Fountain”; it is p…

Back in New York that April, the amitié littéraire continued: Shirley sent Francis a clipping from Housman about the bodily ground of poetry, “a shiver down the spine … constriction of the throat and a precipitation of water to the eyes”; they went to dinner and to the theatre; and Francis continue…

In the spring of 1963 Shirley was working on her first novel, set in Italy, a tale of romantic love eclipsed by its own waning. The Evening of the Holiday was contracted to Macmillan and Knopf after publication in full in The New Yorker: “On Monday I took my piece of writing to Bill [Maxwell] … and…