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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…

Half a century later, Shirley wrote of this period: “Misery, foreboding, a life sentence … In this cruel time I wanted to die. Looking back, I wonder that I didn’t. The worst, beyond worst, of all was of course the lack of letters.” Again, there is some extravagance in the recollection. She had in …

Many years later she recalled meeting “at a gathering, a handsome, reserved, and pleasant person, still young, who was introduced as Miss Scott-Moncrieff,” of whom “it was at once explained, in her presence, that she was—the niece, was it, or a cousin?—of the great translator” of Proust, adding, “S…