‘Instead of a Letter’ by Diana Athill

Diana Athill arrived fairly late to the prose-writing party, though upon discovering Instead of a Letter you would be forgiven for assuming otherwise. The classic memoir, first published by Chatto & Windus in 1963 when Athill was in her mid-forties and already a stalwart of the editing and publishing world, is an impeccably written account of one woman’s journey from rural Norfolk, via Oxford University, to London’s burgeoning literary scene. And, while that may not sound like much to some, it is Athill’s frank and unsentimental voice - not to mention her sharp and skilful hand - which renders Instead of a Letter so very compelling. What could well have become a self-indulgent ‘misery memoir’ is saved from such a bleak fate by Athill’s lack of self-pity and her obvious desire to tell a redemptive tale as opposed to a murky, introspective one. In fact, five memoirs and one novel later, Instead of a Letter is still widely considered to be her finest book. Allow me to give you a timeline of sorts.

Diana Athill was born in December 1917 and brought up in a sprawling thousand-acre estate (yes, really) in the Norfolk countryside. I therefore advise that, when looking over the back jacket of this Granta edition of Instead of a Letter, you take the phrase 'impoverished gentility’ with a pinch of salt. Unless, of course, you class the following as a description of impoverishment: 'necessities included a head gardener with two men under him, two grooms, a chauffeur, a butler and a footman, a cook and a kitchen maid with a scullery maid to help them, a head housemaid with two under-housemaids, and my grandmother’s lady’s maid. They included books and a great deal of wholesome food, linen sheets rather than cotton, and three separate rooms for being in at different times of the day, not counting the dining-room, the smoking-room, the front hall, in which, for some reason, my grandmother always had tea, and the nursery.’ So, although Athill does go on to explain that her immediate family (i.e. her mother and father) were living beyond their means somewhat, I suggest that you focus more on the gentility and less on the impoverishment.

Anyway, material wealth or a supposed lack thereof aside, Instead of a Letter is, at its core, a tale of growing up and heartbreak and, well, growing up through heartbreak. At the age of fifteen Diana fell deeply, passionately, irrevocably in love with Paul (as he is known throughout the book) a young undergraduate who had come to the Athills’ country pile to tutor one of her brothers. They eventually became engaged, however while he was away on duty Paul sent his then-fiancee a dispassionate letter requesting that he be 'released’ from their engagement so that he may marry another woman. Ouch. And while nowadays engagements are approached with an increasingly laissez-faire attitude and are often broken as hastily as they are entered into, this was the 1930s, and I imagine that this missive must have hit the young Athill like a particularly vicious wrecking ball. Her account of this betrayal is decidedly pragmatic, however, and she forgoes any overt emotional exhibitionism in favour of relating the facts. She was hurt, she was numb, and for a long while afterwards she was seemingly asleep to the world.

So, before I rehash the entire text I suppose I ought to summarise: this is a wonderful book, and it is not difficult to see why it has become such a classic in the field of memoir. As one reviewer so rightly suggests, Instead of a Letter ought to be pressed into the hands of every adolescent girl in search of guidance or food for thought on a range of universal issues such as love, sex, longing and, most critically, learning how to feel again following a heartbreak as crushing and unforeseen as that of Athill’s broken engagement. Instead of a Letter is also full of little surprises in that Athill is unabashed in her choice of subject matter and honest almost to a fault. Even at a formidable ninety-four years old she is showing little sign of slowing down: her most recent work Instead of a Book was published just last year. It is next on my list.

This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in August 2012.