*Blog Tour: The Shadowy Third by Julia Parry

I was very kindly gifted a proof copy of the book. Today I'm on the blog tour for The Shadowy Third - Love, Letters and Elizabeth Bowen* which I found fascinating.

A sudden death in the family delivers Julia a box of love letters. Dusty with age, they tell the story of an illicit affair between the brilliant twentieth-century novelist, Elizabeth Bowen, and a young academic called Humphry House - Julia's grandfather.

Using fascinating unpublished correspondence, The Shadowy Third exposes the affair and its impact by following the overlapping lives of three very different characters through some of the most dramatic decades of the twentieth century; 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 story is spiced with social history and a celebrated supporting cast that includes Isaiah Berlin and Virginia Woolf.

In the style of Bowen, a novelist obsessed by sense of place, Julia travels to all the locations written about in the letters, retracing the physical and emotional songlines from Kolkata to Cambridge, Ireland to Texas. With present day story telling as a colourful counterpoint to the historical narrative, this is a debut work of unparalleled personal and familial investigation.

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.

My thoughts?

I found the book fascinating and easy to read. When the author's much loved Uncle dies she inherits a box of correspondence between her grandfather, Humphrey House and novelist, Elizabeth Bowen. He first met her at a dinner in Oxford in 1933 and was instantly smitten.

What follows is Julia retracing her grandfather's steps and visiting the places he lived, worked and wrote about in his letters. She felt a lot of sympathy for her grandmother who quite simply was brushed aside while his infatuation and love for Bowen ran its course. 

Although Elizabeth herself was married to Alan Cameron, a marriage for security and friendship, rather than love and romance. She was known to have many affairs in her lifetime. I liked that the story also told us more about the author, Julia Parry and her life as well as those from the past and the book is interspersed with photographs which enhance the read. It's made me want to pick up an Elizabeth Bowen novel! A great read which I recommend highly.