Instead of a Letter - by Diana Athill (Paperback)

About the Book

"Diana Athill's childhood was idyllic, brought up in the Norfolk countryside. Aged only fifteen, she fell in love with a young undergraduate. They travelled to Oxford, engaged to be married. Then everything fell apart in the cruellest possible way. In this classic modern memoir, Diana Athill dissects the terrible consequences of loss and her struggle to rebuild a personality destroyed by sadness. Yet for all its unhappiness, Instead of a Letter remains a story of hope, written with the frank intelligence and lack of self-pity that have become the hallmarks of Athill's writing."--

Book Synopsis

When Diana Athill, nearly forty-three and far from a household name, sat down to write Instead of a Letter, the first in her series of trailblazing memoirs, she was looking for an answer to the question "What have I lived for?" In this searching book, she recalls her child-hood on her grandparents' magnificent estate, the teenage romance that was certain to lead to marriage, her university days coinciding with the Second World War, and the sudden dissolution of her engagement, a loss that became the defining experience of the next twenty years of her life. Athill is as forthright in confessing her faults as she is in celebrating her triumphs. "From this table, with this white tea-cup, full ashtray, and small glass half full of rum beside me," she writes, "I see my story, ordinary enough though it has all been and sad though much of it was, as a success story."

Review Quotes

"Supple, frank, unafraid of contradictions, Athill's literary voice has all the courageous intelligence one associates with a certain type of British writer but none of the chill. This [is] the author's scrupulous reckoning of her own single and childless existence . . .her work in publishing and the thrilling discovery that she, too, could write." --The New Yorker

"Athill doesn't write as if no one is watching; she writes as if she'd never even imagined someone might watch, and therefore doesn't have a scruple to hold on to... she doesn't pass off heartbreak as a blessing in disguise, or her subsequent successful career as a silver lining. Her abandonment was more like a signpost, something that pointed her to a brambly but invigorating path." --Hillary Kelly, The New Yorker

"Released in 1962, Athill's first memoir, Instead of a Letter, roams from her '30s childhood at Norfolk's Ditchingham Hall to her career in the publishing world of Swinging Sixties London--with the aim of answering the all-consuming question: As someone who "missed the opportunity" to marry and have children, what had she lived for?" --Hayley Maitland, Vogue

"Athill writes elegantly about the shabby gentility of her childhood and her later career as a literary editor, but the drama here is in her frankness about the struggle to rebuild a personality taken apart by sadness." --Susie Steiner, The Guardian

"The reader sees the transformation of the battered soul into a buoyant woman, open-minded and open-hearted." --Hilary Mantel, Spectator

"Perhaps Athill's greatest legacy was her refusal to cede to societal expectations as she carved out a persistently unusual world for herself in which the demands of femininity--marriage and children, specifically--were rethought and redefined." --Lena Dunham, The New York Times

"Taken all in all, Diana Athill was a woman of parts. She endured a worthy loneliness--that of the lifelong single woman--all the while keeping company with her own working mind. Even when her subject was slight or misguided, as I sometimes thought, she wrote to make sense of things. That's what writing meant to her. Very often the work reads as though she is listening to the sound of her own life coming back at her through the words she is writing, and she is speaking to that sound. In the great tradition of personal narrative, her voice was at once her instrument and her subject."
--Vivian Gornick, The New York Review of Books

About the Author

Diana Athill (1917-2019) helped André Deutsch establish the publishing company that bore his name and worked as an editor for Deutsch for four decades. Her distinguished career as an editor is the subject of her memoir Stet. She is the author of seven further volumes of memoirs--Instead of a Letter; After a Funeral; Yesterday Morning; Make Believe; Somewhere Towards the End; Alive, Alive Oh!; A Florence Diary--and a collection of letters, Instead of a Book. Her only novel, Don't Look at Me Like That, was first published in 1967. In January 2009, she won the Costa Biography Award for Somewhere Towards the End and was presented with an Order of the British Empire.

Lena Dunham is a writer, director, and actress. Her book Not That Kind of Girl was published in 2014. Her latest film is Catherine Called Birdy.