Diana Athill..? 19 1 28 (9) 25 2 2

2019 1 27

She was born on the 21st December 1917 which means she had recently celebrated her 101st b-d and exceptionally had become a successful writer once she retired at the age of 75, and was still being published and writing in her 90s.

For those of you like me who had never heard of her until her death she was to quote the blurb in the Guardian newspaper my only newspaper these days which i read on line either whilst still horizontal in my bed or from where i am sitting now in front of my pc, the sub-title describing her as a very remarkable woman to their announcement about the loss of this most absolute character of a lady...

The article was written by a person who had been edited by the publishing house which she had worked for most of her working life when she was his editor and who later became her editor, so a very close albeit professional relationship.

To say she was among the last of a dying breed is perhaps an understatement for she was born into the British upper middle classes in the family’s mansion, Ditchingham Hall on what is now the 14th Earl Ferrers’ estate, after it passed from a member of Athill's family to a relative to the 13^th Earl’s wife: Annabel Carr after she became his Countess. She had been brought up and educated by Governesses and Nannies until age 14 when according to her, the family enjoyed two activities: riding ponies when they were out of doors and reading when they were indoors.

In a sense her life was blighted when as a 15 year old she fell in love with her younger brother’s tutor, and at age 19 became engaged to be married whilst studying at Oxford’s Lady Margaret College, to someone who joined the RAF and became a bomber pilot in WW ll, only to cease answering her letters and to write to her two years later calling the engagement off.

Understandably this had a profound effect on her life but which she always claimed was cushioned by the fact that her family were “wrapped warmly in the belief that we were the best kind of people short of saintliness: a belief common in the upper levels of the English middle class, and confirmed by a pride in being English” and admitted to a feeling of smugness which returned after her success in later life as a writer, saying “if this is smugness, and she couldn’t help feeling it was, then she had to report that `though repulsive to witness, it is a far more comfortable state to be in than its opposite´.”

Well to many of my blog readership they will know that another paragon of the British upper classes, George Orwell or Eric Arthur Blair, who is also regarded as one of the greatest authors of the 20^th century for his books Animal Farm and 1984, has long been one of my heroes, but not for taking so much pride in his upper-class background so much as just the opposite…

So I hope this briefest of introductions to the writings of Diana Athill will do for you what her death earlier this week has done for me, and that is to whet my appetite for more of her writings, and have me visit our local library later today to see whether they have any of her books, or whether they can order “Somewhere Towards the End”, her most successful book she had published when she 90, and when her editor Ian Jack had criticised an earlier draft for containing too much sex, whose criticism she took on board for the published version, and the second book I’d like to read “Letter, and After a Funeral” which she wrote as a catharsis to over-come being jilted in her early life by the bomber-pilot… Happy reading everyone!