The Shadowy Third

THE UNIQUE AND COMPELLING PERSONAL BIOGRAPHY WHICH UNCOVERS THE HIDDEN LOVE TRIANGLE BETWEEN NOVELIST ELIZABETH BOWEN AND THE AUTHOR'S GRANDPARENTS

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

So begins a lifechanging quest to understand this affair, which had profound repercussions for Julia's family, not least her grandmother, Madeline. Drawing on the trove of hitherto unpublished correspondence, Julia traces these three very different characters through some of the most dramatic decades of the twentieth century: from 1930s Oxford and the Anglo-Irish Big House, to Texas, to the last days of Empire in India and on into WWII. Crafting a tale spiced with social history and a celebrated supporting cast that includes Isaiah Berlin and Virginia Woolf, Parry 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.

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 charitable organisations. She splits her time between London and Madrid. The Shadowy Third is her first book.