Love in the Blitz: The Greatest Lost Love Letters of the Second World War

(Hardback)

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Her voice is absolutely, beguilingly conversational Intelligent, allusive, iconoclastic, captivatingly intense This is the news from the domestic frontline: personal, unique, unexpurgated, without propaganda, as it unfolded and was experienced Splendid
William Boyd, Guardian
With the intimacy and wit of a Second World War Bridget Jones, Eileen Alexander offers a portal into life during the Blitz.

Eileen Alexander fell in love amidst the falling of bombs, finding a quotation from poetry at every turn. Graduating from Cambridge in 1939, she had just been injured in a car crash (the man she had a soft spot for was driving) and had firm ambitions of studying further, making herself useful and absolutely not getting married.

Her letters offer a love story and a unique snapshot of the home front, as well as resurrecting the voice of a profoundly funny writer.

I wonder what anyone would think if they suddenly came across my letters to you & started reading them in chronological order Eileen wrote in 1941. I think theyd say This girl never lived till she loved and it would be true, darling.

Reviews

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 out of a chance purchase on eBay. Some of wartimes funniest, most unexpected and possibly unintentionally sexiest letters. Eileen has an insatiable eye for funny stories amid the strange circumstances of war. There are echoes of intimate, Mitfordian shorthand and a touch of the self-deprecating, self-doubting Bridget Jones about her.
The Spectator

It has been a long time since I enjoyed a book as much Of the hundreds of books about World War II that Ive read, this is one of the best. Imagine how [Austen] might have witnessed the Blitz, and you have a sense of this wonderful book
New York Times

Eileen emerges as a force of nature, and her voice is one of the real joys in these remarkable letters. She was clever and caustic, without being cruel; intellectually brilliant and revelling in that fact a memoir of hope and resilience, as much as of love The Times

A trove of dazzlingly literary love letters. These are as [Oswyn] Murray rightly concludes, some of the most beautiful and vivid love letters of the Second World War
Daily Telegraph

The great value of Eileens book is that it takes you out of our present troubles into a world even more dangerous and destructive, which people nevertheless survived
Sunday Times

This remarkable treasure trove of letters givesa unique insight intohome-front life and romance
Mail on Sunday

Superbly entertaining on almost every page there is a gleaming little starburst of life She is immensely clever and her literary judgements are delicious. Her writing is a diary-like outpouring, a stream of consciousness in which she relives her days in the glorifying imagined gaze of her recipient; it is a mass of aperus, jokes, observations and confessions.
TLS

Author Bio

Eileen Alexander was born in Cairo and grew up in a cosmopolitan Jewish family before moving to Cambridge as a student. She graduated from Girton College with a first-class degree in English in 1939, and worked during the Second World War for the civil service in the Air Ministry. Eileen went on to be a teacher, writer and translator, including translating some of Georges Simenon's works.