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Through 2000, it was clear to their friends that Emmy and Bill Maxwell were both increasingly frail and, by the summer, that Emmy was close to death. Bill was reading War and Peace to her, and then to himself. Shirley later wrote that his “solace and pleasure in the book were an event in those room…

Unacknowledged and unacknowledgeable, Alec’s death, the persistent and reiterated loss prompted endless recollection, reflection: “As if one had swallowed a stone. The compulsive blighting.” Inexpressible—not simply because the right to the expression of grief remained with his widow and family, bu…

In September she marked the deaths, three days apart, of Alberto Moravia in Rome and Patrick White in Sydney. The news, not unexpected in either case, was nonetheless “somehow shocking.” Both were, she wrote Donald Keene, “difficult men, and both, I’d say, writers who had lost impetus in later year…

Such courtesy was, for Shirley, of a piece with local respect for the arts. She recalled sending, in 1973, a congratulatory telegram from the Capri post office to Patrick White on hearing of his Nobel Prize: “The cable boys (far from the imposing stern professional ethics of indifference to message…

On Capri, Shirley grieved for her mother’s life as much as for her death: “One of her tragedies—as I do believe she had tragedy—was the inability to believe that other people appreciated her best qualities and had goodwill towards her; that she did not need to keep testing affection till it collaps…