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Her second was “Vittorio,” the writing of which had preoccupied her through 1960; she found it difficult to write from the perspective of an older man surprised by love. The upturning of Vittorio’s life comes about when he invites an English couple into his family home—in a town resembling Siena—as…

Shirley was furious, but the disappointment had been overshadowed even before it happened by a letter from The New Yorker, this time an acceptance. It is not clear whether she had revised those first rejected stories or if this was new work. Either way, she now knew someone on the inside, which cha…

Perhaps her claims to penury were exaggerated; there was, after all, enough money to travel to Italy for the next several summers, as well as time to spend there, thanks to the UN’s generous allowance of six weeks annual leave: “I went to Italy on the charter flight and came back with $10 which I a…

Here was the weight of momentous event and of individual self-realisation that had not, Shirley felt, been possible in the country or the family of her birth, nor in the independent adult life she had until then been able to fashion for herself. Elena embodied philosophical and aesthetic principles…

Leone worked in an intelligence office, and Elena found a position first as a cook at a British government-run kitchen, then as a translator and interpreter at the BBC, and later as an artist at Harrods. On the tenth anniversary of her brother’s death, while at the BBC, she broadcast a memorial hon…