SHADOWY THIRD: Love, Letters, and Elizabeth Bowen

Like reading one of Elizabeth Bowen's great novels, this award winning biography is gently elegiac, beautifully written and fascinating. Uncovering the hidden love triangle between novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the author's grandparents, this critically acclaimed biography deals with never-before-seen letters detailing the affair. A death in the family delivers Julia Parry a box of letters. Dusty with age they reveal a secret love affair between the celebrated novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the academic Humphry House, Julia's grandfather. So begins a life changing quest to understand the affair which had profound repercussions for Julia's family, not least her grandmother Madeline. Julia traces these three very different characters through 1930s Oxford and Ireland, Texas, Calcutta in the last days of Empire, and on into World War Two. With a supporting cast that includes Isaiah Berlin and Virginia Woolf, much is revealed about her bookish and kindly grandfather, and his sudden death, and Parry is a spirited narrator who is clearly a great admirer of Bowen's fiction but isn't blindsided by this. The affair lasted roughly from 1933 to 1935 and, obsessed with hauntings, journeys and houses, Bowen might even approve of this book. 373pp, paperback. Photos.