Instead of a Letter

A riveting memoir about betrayed love, loss, and finding redemption and purpose in creative work.

Diana Athill’s childhood in the Norfolk countryside was idyllic. At the age of fifteen, she fell in love with a young undergraduate. They became engaged and traveled to Oxford. Then everything fell apart in the cruelest possible way.

In this classic modern memoir, 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 her writing.

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.