Victoria Glendinning

Dame Rebecca West (Cicely Fairfield in private life) had a literary career that spanned most of the 20th century, and she seems to have been just as feared and respected a journalist when she was writing suffragette polemics in her teens as she was when she was reporting on the Iranian Embassy siege — happening outside her windows in Kensington — aged ninety. Many of her book reviews, with the famous knockout blow in the first sentence, became legendary. But her fiction often seems a show more little bit intimidating, tucked away in that pile of Viragos we mean to get around to one day, and overshadowed by its autobiographical elements, particularly the relationship with H G Wells and her long-running feud with their son Anthony West, a lot of it conducted through competing novels. And then there's the whole complicated business of her stance on Yugoslavia and her objection to Churchill switching his support from Mihailović to Tito. Lots of scope for biographers to get side-tracked.

Victoria Glendinning knew Rebecca West in the last couple of decades of her life, and, with a track-record of biographies of Great Female Writers, was obviously signed up as a safe pair of hands to tell her side of the story and defend her against the inevitable posthumous attack from Anthony. All the same, this isn't quite a bland "official biography". Glendinning is quite prepared to admit that her subject had her faults, that her famous determination to speak her mind in print and take no prisoners went together with a dangerously thin skin, and that her feminism and independence were never entirely free from the gender attitudes of her Edwardian childhood. Those contradictions, perhaps, were what made her so interesting, but they also gave her a difficult life. Because of the sort of person she was, it took her ten years to accept that she would never be anything more than "the other woman" (or rather, one of them) in the relationship with Wells; it brought her a humiliating and distressing rejection when she tried to turn a fling with Lord Beaverbrook(!) into a relationship, and of course it particularly hurt her relationship with her son.

Glendinning calls this a "little biography", and at 250 pages of text it's certainly quite short by the standards of the genre, but it packs quite a lot of thoughtful analysis into that space, sparing us a lot of the day to day detail that we probably didn't really want anyway. If you're a serious student of West's work, you'll probably want something with more footnotes and a more detailed bibliography, and perhaps with a bit more outsider's perspective on the quarrels, but otherwise this seems like a very good place to start. show less

What a life, what a personality. Makes one think about the importance of privilege/connections/money/hustling/branding to a writer's life and how the societal worship of eccentricities can sometimes overshadow an artist's works. Especially with the Woolf connections and references peppered throughout the book.

Glendinning is thorough in her scholarship and organisation, with just enough pithy sideways authorial interjection to temper and balance out Sitwell's overwhelming individuality. show more Published in 1981, the book referenced a few times the letters between Sitwell and Tchelitchew to be released by Yale in 2000. I wonder if there's any new edition with perhaps an afterword about how they would colour Glendinning's analyses of their smothering codependent relationship.

Aside: it's always nice when one's faves show up in someone else's biographies, it really humanises (de-lionises) all the well-known names and also populates the setting of the past really well. show less

Advance Reader Copy

Elizabeth Bowen (Anglo-Irish, 1899-1973) was the author of at least eleven major novels, and umpteen short stories. Charles Ritchie (1906-1995) was a Canadian career diplomat who worked with the UN from its inception, was involved in NATO and was the Canadian ambassador to the U.S. Love’s Civil War is an edited collection of Bowen’s letters and Ritchie’s diary entries, the documentation of a complex and at times incomprehensible love affair.

Reading this book through show more to the end became an effort of will, a Herculean task requiring fortitude and grit. I picked it up and put it down several times and would cheerfully have ditched it, if it hadn’t been for a commitment as an early reviewer. The struggle wasn’t with their writing. Bowen writes beautifully in her letters, with little masterpieces of description and characterisation; Ritchie less so but his were diary entries. No, the struggle was with the relationship itself and its effect on their lives. There were times when I wanted to hurl the book in frustration with both of them - particularly with her. A brilliant, articulate, fun-loving and fun woman, she nonetheless seemed to abase herself at Ritchie’s feet, submerged in a love for him which would never develop into a life together because he wouldn’t let it. Her moaned “oh Charles, Charles, Charles” or “dear beautiful, I love you, I love you” at the end of many of her letters had me gritting my teeth. “Give him the boot!”, I wanted to yell back through time, “Expend your energy on someone who will love you fully in the way you need and deserve!” But it wasn’t to be.

Part of my frustration was that I didn’t “get” her fascination with Ritchie. He came across as a self-absorbed narcissist, a careerist who always put himself and his own wants and needs first. He was a philanderer, not only betraying Bowen but his wife, Sylvia. He must have been very good at his job because he rose up steadily through the diplomatic ranks. But his purported charm seemed shallow, of the cocktail party sort. I struggled to see what Bowen saw in him, to the point where she made him into the sine qua non in her life. At times it made her seem adolescent in her affections, the angst and constant questioning those of a seventeen year old, not an accomplished woman of letters, sought after by universities to be writer in residence and adored by her students. As judgemental as this likely sounds, it was what was giving me the most trouble reading the first two thirds of the book, as he seemed almost lifeless set beside her energy.

But somehow this relationship hung on for thirty years until her death. As ultimately unfulfilled and unfulfilling as it appeared to be, as awkward and complex, as geographically challenged with continents or oceans between them, they clung to it, writing constantly to each other, growing old, if not together, at least in tandem. It’s difficult to say whether Bowen would have been as successful an author if the affair had ripened into a fully realised relationship or whether this strange yearning after the unattainable provided her with the impetus to write the way she did.

Victoria Glendinning’s editing is unobtrusive but very helpful, her asides in italics useful for fleshing out unknown individuals and their histories, their connection to Bowen’s and Ritchie’s lives. This book did have the effect of making me want to search out Bowen’s writing, to see what she had to say as a writer. It seemed strange to read about her so intimately with no knowledge of what or how she wrote.

Would I recommend this book? On the whole, yes. Although Bowen and Ritchie alternately annoyed and frustrated me, they also provided an interesting glimpse at an era which was one of tremendous upheaval and change, with marvelous bits of gossip in Bowen’s letters. Bowen lived the upper crust life with servants, the great house in Ireland, flitting to Europe, sailing to America, yet struggling with financial troubles. Ritchie was heavily involved in the restructuring of Europe at the end of the war, as well as the creation of the U.N. (although there is a paucity of his actual activities mentioned, no doubt for security reasons). So, their love affair aside, they were interesting studies. But the love affair itself is the point of the book, of the letters and the diary entries, and about this I remain somewhat ambivalent.

I came, by the end, to a kind of grudging acceptance that their relationship was what it was, however uncomfortably it sat in light of Bowen’s frequent bouts with despair and its seemingly lopsided nature. Whatever they gave each other, each seemed to need: Bowen, an object to love as a lodestone for all her ardour; Ritchie, to be the recipient of an unwavering adoration, an idolisation he seemed to need. To his credit, Ritchie went to England to be at her side when she died of lung cancer (she was a heavy smoker and a regular drinker). The last sentence of the book does indicate that whatever his surface failings, she had meant everything to him but I won’t spoil it by telling you what he wrote.

Victoria Glendinning's biography of Elizabeth Bowen is on my must read list now. show less

Leo Ulm is a bit of a monster, surrounded by three women, a wife, ex-wife and daughter-in-Law, as well as the occasional other women. A respected commentator/historian who enjoys his celebrity. Written and set in the 1980s. Despite his monstrosity you can't help but continue reading.