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 to which Shirley cleaved: “To have known her was to understand that the human ideal is not a striving for perfection but for wholeness: she was true, vital and entirely human, not a paragon but a criterion. She would have disliked such words, for she repudiated praise with real impatience, not weighing our human need to pay her tribute. More than thirty years after her death, her daughter-in-law Mirella said, of the years at Solaia, ‘We knew then that it was a miracle.’” On the thirtieth anniversary of Elena’s death, Shirley wrote in her diary that her greatest influence was “to make a principled life believable … She had lived it, she was it.”