Welcome to my stop on this blog tour for Julia Parry’s book, ‘The Shadowy Third: Love, Letters and Elizabeth Bowen’.

This blog tour is organised by Random Things Tours and the book was published on 25th February, 2021. Thank you to the tour organiser, publisher and author for my free copy in exchange for an honest review.

From the Publisher:

‘A fascinating and moving portrait of love, loyalty and infidelity.’

Sarah Waters

A sudden death in the family delivers Julia a box of love letters. Dusty with age, they reveal an illicit affair between the celebrated twentieth-century Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen and Humphry House – Julia’s grandfather.

So begins an intriguing quest to discover and understand this affair, one with profound repercussions for Julia’s family, not least for her grandmother, Madeline. This is a book about how stories are told in real life, in fiction and in families.

Inspired by Bowen’s own obsession with place and memory, Julia travels to all the locations in the letters – from Kolkata to Cambridge and from Ireland to Texas. The reader is taken from the rarefied air of Oxford in the 1930s, to the Anglo-Irish Big House, to the last days of Empire in India and on into the Second World War.

The fascinating unpublished correspondence, a wealth of family photographs, and a celebrated supporting cast that includes Isaiah Berlin and Virginia Woolf add further richness to this unique work.

The Shadowy Third opens up a lost world, one with complex and often surprising attitudes to love and sex, work and home, duty and ambition, and to writing itself. Weaving present-day story telling with historical narrative, this is a beautifully written debut of literary and familial investigation from an original and captivating new voice.

Praise for ‘The Shadowy Third’:

‘The Shadowy Third reveals the secret life of the author of ‘The Death of the Heart’, a title that applies to the man and women whose sepia- covered correspondence led to this riveting memoir.’

MARLENE WAGMAN GELLER (Women of Means: Fascinating Biographies of Royals, Heiresses, Eccentrics and
Other Poor Little Rich Girls)

‘.. a captivating mélange of memoir, biography, social history and literary evaluation.’

ELEANOR FITZSIMONS (Wilde’s Women and The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit)

‘Even if you have never read Elizabeth Bowen’s novels and have never heard of Humphry House, his granddaughter’s quest will hold your attention as it held mine.’

ANN THWAITE, award-wining author of AA Milne: His Life (Whitbread Biography of the Year)

My Review:

OK, confession time. As an English Literature graduate, I should probably be more au fait with the works of Elizabeth Bowen. Given that I focused on women’s writing, she really should have come up more on the course. And I really should have read her work since I left university, some time in the Dark Ages.

However, my lack of knowledge of Bowen and her works didn’t dent my enjoyment of this book at all. This is a book packed with interesting people, places and events – personal, literary and on the world stage. It is an impressive and engaging piece of non-fiction writing and I genuinely could not put it down.

Essentially, the story is one of a love triangle between Elizabeth Bowen, Humphry House and Madeline Church (later House). However, this is a reductive description – the affair only lasts a few years in the 1930s – as it also encompasses the wider lives and relationships of these three key figures, as well as a meditation on writing and storytelling.

The book begins with the author, Julia Parry, being given the collected correspondence between Elizabeth Bowen and Parry’s own grandfather, Humphry House. These letters come to Parry via her uncle, but it becomes apparent that Humphry’s wife, Madeline (Parry’s grandmother) has ‘curated’ the letters – burning some, including her own letters from the period, and annotating others. This is fascinating in itself as this woman – the ‘wronged’ party in the affair between Bowen and House – ultimately gets some control of the story told while paradoxically removing her own ‘voice’ from the account.

Parry picks up the story as being essentially one of place – important to Bowen and also filling in key information in the story of this 1930s love triangle featuring the author’s grandparents and Elizabeth Bowen. Each chapter focuses on a different location that plays an important part in the story, from the marital homes of the Houses, Bowen’s ancestral home in Ireland, Bowen’s London home and India, where Humphry House worked for a period.

These places have changed in the interim, but it is fascinating to read about Parry visiting them and reflecting on their significance to her ancestors and the story she is telling. The pictures included in the text are a huge bonus for the reader too – we can visualise these places and people too. This book is part travelogue and it is an engaging way of structuring the story. I loved the look at the last days of the Empire in India, the elitism of 1930s Oxford, the lives of the Irish country estate and the Bloomsbury set.

Obviously, the main draw for this book is the figure of Bowen herself, as well as cameo appearances by Virginia Woolf and Isaiah Berlin. This is a book that has literary importance and will be of especial interest given the recent re-issuing of Bowen’s books in 2019 to mark 120 years since her birth. We do gain an insight into the woman herself through her own words, plus see previously unpublished photographs of her from Parry’s family’s collection.

Through the letters, we see a complex woman who was – in many ways – out of step with her time. She is often contradictory, blunt and critical, but could also be a thoughtful, intelligent and incisive correspondent. Her judgements on Madeline are often harsh and her gift of a tea set seems a comment on Madeline’s role within the domestic sphere compared to Bowen’s own in the literary world – she could, it seems, be spiteful. However, balanced with this is a woman in an unconsummated marriage to an older man so maybe her extra-marital affairs are more understandable in this context. I’ll be honest – I found Bowen the hardest of the three figures to get a grasp of as I was reading because my feelings towards her fluctuated all the time.

For me, the most interesting figure was actually Madeline, Parry’s grandmother. I felt that the narrative was at its most interesting when we saw this woman – dismissed as dim by her husband, sneered at for her domesticity and unappealing children by Bowen – step into the limelight. As a modern reader, I found it difficult to understand her acceptance of the affair between her husband and Bowen, but also was riveted by the strength of the woman who followed Humphry to India, raised children without him, flew in a tiny plane in Calcutta in the 1930s and ultimately successfully picked up Humphry House’s literary project after his death.

And that brings me to Humphry. I am incredibly aware of this man as being the author’s grandfather so I am reluctant to be too critical. He was clearly – let us say – a ‘product of his time’, someone who very much lived the realities of the sexual double standard. He did warn Madeline before they married that he would not be faithful and seems the weakest of the three – the true ‘shadowy third’ (in my opinion) caught between two redoubtable, interesting and successful women. His appeal to these women is slightly difficult to understand as his own words reveal him to have an inflated sense of his own intelligence when his spotted career history and failure to pass the War Office’s IQ test tell otherwise.

I could wax lyrical about this book for much longer, but I think it is one that readers should discover for themselves. It absolutely should not be approached as an academic text or a definitive view of Bowen – it is something altogether more nuanced and interesting. It allows us to see fascinating glimpses of Bowen, different places and times, plus the sexual mores and lives of women from a period that is not our own. It also allows us to meditate (with the author) on place, the fabric of our lives, notions of legacy and narrative – and I adored it.

About the Author:

Julia Parry was brought up in West Africa and educated at St Andrews and Oxford. She teaches English literature and has worked as a writer and photographer for a variety of publications and charities. She lives in London and Madrid. This is her first book.