Love in the Blitz
A Woman in a World Turned Upside Down
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- $399.00
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- $399.00
Descripción editorial
‘Her voice is absolutely, beguilingly conversational … Intelligent, allusive, iconoclastic, captivatingly intense … This is the news from the domestic frontline: personal, unique, unexpurgated, without propaganda, as it unfolded and was experienced … Splendid’
William Boyd, Guardian
With the intimacy and wit of a Second World War Bridget Jones, Eileen Alexander offers a portal into life during the Blitz.
Eileen Alexander fell in love amidst the falling of bombs, finding a quotation from poetry at every turn. Graduating from Cambridge in 1939, she had just been injured in a car crash (the man she had a soft spot for was driving) and had firm ambitions of studying further, making herself useful and absolutely not getting married.
Her letters offer a love story and a unique snapshot of the home front, as well as resurrecting the voice of a profoundly funny writer.
‘I wonder what anyone would think if they suddenly came across my letters to you & started reading them in chronological order?’ Eileen wrote in 1941. ‘I think they’d say “This girl never lived till she loved” – and it would be true, darling.’
Reviews
‘Once in a while, just at the right moment, a truly gorgeous real-life love story appears out of the blue, or in this case out of a chance purchase on eBay. Some of wartime’s funniest, most unexpected and possibly unintentionally sexiest letters. Eileen has an insatiable eye for funny stories amid the strange circumstances of war. There are echoes of intimate, Mitfordian shorthand and a touch of the self-deprecating, self-doubting Bridget Jones about her.’
The Spectator
‘It has been a long time since I enjoyed a book as much … Of the hundreds of books about World War II that I’ve read, this is one of the best. Imagine how [Austen] might have witnessed the Blitz, and you have a sense of this wonderful book’
New York Times
‘Eileen emerges as a force of nature, and her voice is one of the real joys in these remarkable letters. She was clever and caustic, without being cruel; intellectually brilliant and revelling in that fact… a memoir of hope and resilience, as much as of love’ The Times
‘A trove of dazzlingly literary love letters. These are as [Oswyn] Murray rightly concludes, ‘some of the most beautiful and vivid’ love letters of the Second World War’
Daily Telegraph
‘The great value of Eileen’s book is that it takes you out of our present troubles into a world even more dangerous and destructive, which people nevertheless survived’
Sunday Times
‘This remarkable treasure trove of letters gives a unique insight into home-front life and romance’
Mail on Sunday
‘Superbly entertaining … on almost every page there is a gleaming little starburst of life … She is immensely clever and her literary judgements are delicious. Her writing is a diary-like outpouring, a stream of consciousness in which she relives her days in the glorifying imagined gaze of her recipient; it is a mass of aperçus, jokes, observations and confessions.’
TLS
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This collection of letters written by literary translator Alexander (1917 1986) to her future husband, Gershon Ellenbogen, between July 1939 and March 1946 proves a remarkable aggregate of public and personal history. It begins with, per editor Crane, a "remarkably forgiving letter" from Alexander to Ellenbogen after she is badly injured in a car crash while he, a friend and fellow Cambridge student, is driving. The ensuing correspondence (of which his half is lost) traces their deepening bond, as he serves in the RAF and she in the Army bureaucracy, and shares details of ordinary British life during WWII, perhaps most dramatically of blitz-era London. "I've been nervous in Air-Raids before, but last night I was Terrified," Alexander writes, noting elsewhere, "gas-mask practice is at 10 and I've left my mask at home again." She also shares "libelous" gossip about her friends ("Darling Jean Swills Pink Gin with Terrific Swagger It's my private opinion that she's a bit of a Wild Oat") and describes familial roadblocks to their relationship, as when her parents are scandalized by her plans to stay with Ellenbogen near his training camp. Any reader with an interest in cultural history or a love of romance will find this a book to savor.
