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Love in the Blitz: The Long-Lost Letters of a Brilliant Young Woman to Her Beloved on the Front
Maybe someday
42
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
3/100Critics
81/100Scholars
Author:
Eileen Alexander
Publisher:
Harper
Date:
May 26, 2020
Love in the Blitz is a glimpse of life in London during World War II and an illuminating portrait of a brilliant young woman trying to carve a place for herself in a time of uncertainty.
What The Reviewers Say
The letters are, as one of their editors notes, close to 'an uninhibited and unstoppable stream of consciousness . . . written from air-raid shelters, and office desks, on buses and station platforms, in hotel foyers and under hair-dryers'. The 1,400 letters were uncovered by chance in an eBay auction by their future editor and transcriber, David McGowan.
A perceptive foreword by Oswyn Murray, for whose father Alexander worked in the Air Ministry during the war, describes the letters as 'an immense literary discovery', but what they are above all is superbly entertaining.
As the course of [Alexander's] life shifted abruptly and against her will that year, like the lives of so many at the onset of World War II, Alexander responded with unflappable humor and irrepressible intellect, both of which shine through in Love in the Blitz.
Once in a while, just at the right moment, a truly gorgeous real-life love story appears out of the blue, or in this case...the wonderful (and superlatively edited) seat-of-the-pants romance of Eileen Alexander and fellow Cambridge student Gershon Ellenbogen.
