Dear Edward

摘要

DIANA ATHILL was well past normal retirement age when she wrote a series of memoirs that made her a cult figure.As a young woman she had written a novel, a collection of short stories and a cathartic memoir about being jilted by her lover.But her literary skills went mainly into editing the books of others at Andre Deutsch,a London publisher, where she worked for decades until she was 75. Near the end of this career she started writing again, and over the next 22 years she produced five more memoirs, including "Stet", an acclaimed account of her editing life, working with authors such as Philip Roth and John Updike, published when she was 83. She finished with "Somewhere Towards the End", about getting old, for which she earned the Costa Biography prize as well as an obe in 2009.Now 93, Miss Athill still takes speaking engagements, but her writing seems to be behind her. So it is good to have this new collection of her letters to Edward Field, a close friend, spanning a period of 26 years. This is not just squeezing the lemon for a bit more juice. By their nature these letters are quite different from the polished prose of the memoirs. They are spontaneous and unstructured, full of daily minutiae (visits to the dentist, car trouble, useless builders) and delightful snippets from her colourful personal life. She gossips about mutual friends and tells stories about the literary world she is immersed in ("I am going to have an interesting lunch tomorrow with the mistress dumped by Vidia Naipaul when he married his Indian wife"). Mr