Diana Athill

Considered a Mastepiece of the "Modern" Memoir upon publication in 1962, instead of a letter marks the beginning of diana athill's Brilliant Literary Career. --

Instead of a Letter: A Memoir

An esteemed memoirist and one of the great editors in British publishing examines aging with the grace of Elegy for Iris and the wry irreverence of I Feel Bad About My Neck.

Somewhere Towards the End

In 1950s England, well-brought-up young women are meant to aspire to the respectable life. Some things are not to be spoken of; some are most certainly not to be done. There are rules, conventions. Meg Bailey obeys them. She progresses from Home Counties school to un-Bohemian art college with few outward signs of passion or frustration. Her personality is submerged in polite routines; even with her best friend, Roxane, what can't be said looms far larger than what can. But circumstances change. Meg gets a job and moves to London. Roxane gets married to a man picked out by her mother. And then Meg does something shocking - shocking not only by the standards of her time, but by our own. As sharp and startling now as when it was written, Don't Look at Me Like That matches Diana Athill's memoirs After a Funeral and Instead of a Letter in its gift for storytelling and its unflinching candour about love and betrayal.

Don't Look at Me Like that

"The charming and vivacious diary of Diana Athill's holiday to Florence in the late 1940s."--

A Florence diary

This is a collection of short stories by writer Diana Athill.

Midsummer Night in the Workhouse

Lena Dunham

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 childhood 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.”

Instead of a Letter

A candid novel of love, betrayal, and friendship about a young woman who breaks with her peers, moves to London, and begins a shocking affair. “When I was at school I used to think that everyone disliked me, and it wasn’t far from true” confesses Meg Bailey at the start of Don’t Look at Me Like That. Coming of age in the mid-1940s, Meg finds herself to be out of place wherever she finds herself: She is a nonbeliever in her father’s parsonage, an artistic dreamer at her stuffy boarding school, a provincial in the worldly circles frequented by her best friend Roxane and Dick, Roxane’s future husband. It is only when Meg, newly graduated from art school, moves into an untidy London rooming house alive with the sounds of crying children, sparring lovers, and even foreigners, that she begins to feel at home. But ties to the past are not so easily severed, and Meg must disentangle herself from her troubled intimacy with Roxane and Dick before she can begin to start “living in her own way.” Don’t Look at Me Like That is the only novel by the famed memoirist and editor Diana Athill, who died in 2019 at the age of one hundred and one. At once clear-eyed and compassionate, it is a story of making mistakes and making a life.

Don't Look at Me Like That

For almost 50 years Diana Athill has been regarded as one of the finest editors in London as well as a considerable and unjustly neglected author in her own right. Stet is her captivating memoir of a lifetime's work in publishing.

A Memoir

Stet

After a Funeral

And Other Things That Matter

Alive, Alive Oh!

بعد جنازة

a memoir

After a funeral

Depicts the friendship between the author and the American poet Edward Field for over thirty years through a series of letters that include gossip about authors and mutual friends, their careers, and the art of writing.

Letters to a Friend

In a celebration of one of Britain's best-loved authors, four of Diana Athill's memoirs - spanning the 20th century from her childhood to old age - are now collected in one volume.

The Selected Memoirs of Diana Athill

Life Class

The extraordinary story of Diana Athill's relationship with a black civil rights leader

Make Believe

Diana Athill has written three memoirs which have been acclaimed as classics for their insight, candour and wit: Instead of a Letter, After a Funeral, and most recently, Stet - an editor's life. Here she goes back to the beginning, in a sharp evocation of a childhood unfashionably filled with happiness - a Norfolk country house, servants, the pleasures of horses, the unfolding secrets of adults and sex. This is England in the 1920s, seen (with a clear and unsentimental eye) from the vantage point of England in 2001. It was a privileged and loving life: but did it equip her to be happy?

Yesterday Morning

Diana Athill has corresponded with the American poet Edward Field for over thirty years, freely sharing jokes, pleasures and pains with her old friend, and writing with an intimacy and spontaneity even more revealing than the candour of her celebrated memoirs. Edited, selected and introduced by Athill, and annotated with her own delightful notes, this collection of those letters reveals a sharply intelligent woman with a keen eye for the absurd, a brilliant turn of phrase and a wicked sense of humour. Covering her career as an editor, the adventure of her retirement, her immersion in her own writing and her reactions to becoming unexpectedly famous in her old-age, and including gossip about mutual friends, sharp pen portraits, and uninhibited accounts her relationships - and ailments - Instead of a Book gives a wonderful description of a woman growing older without ever losing her zest for life.

Instead of a Book

Stunning reissue of Diana Athill's memoir of the loss of her first great love in the second world war.

Sarebbe bastata una lettera

Diana Athill's childhood in the Norfolk countryside was blissful. In 1932, aged 15, she fell passionately in love with a young undergraduate. She went up to Oxford and was engaged to be married. Then everything fell apart in the cruellest possible way.

Diana Athill

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