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When Shirley was detailed to work with him through the early summer of 1953, at the end of the emotionally taxing year of her liaison with Howard, she was ready to fall in love again. Tex, as he would later disclose to her, had had affairs before, approaching them as something extraneous to his fam…

Her work at the TAA was low-level and routine: recording minutes of meetings, typing, filing, all of it less than stimulating. She seems to have approached it with some disdain, and her efforts were rewarded with similar lack of approval and little advancement. For intellectual enrichment she turne…

Chris Cooper had cautioned her about taking her professional self too seriously: “So the prospect of an Active Life opens before you? Don’t become a Career Woman, with black tailored suit and horn-rimmed glasses!” He suggested that her new interest in politics “might fill the gap caused by the abse…

I have been trying to write to you times without number but have failed because you are too far away and because we have not seen each other for such a long time. I feel and have felt for a long time that I have made a mess of things in thinking I could shape this life into something that I could…

The disclosure shifted the discussion significantly, away from Shirley’s larger anxieties and her desire to hear the language of devotion toward Alec’s more pragmatic focus. He was concerned that his financial circumstances were not strong, writing in December that he felt “selfish and inconsiderat…