Written in the author’s mid-forties, Instead of a Letter tells a story of childhood in the English countryside, high times at Oxford during the 1930s, bleak times during the war; of adolescent romance imagined into being, carried to the brink of adulthood, then lost with crushing effect. The ensuing sadness shadows Athill’s emerging career at the BBC and in the book world—she was one of the founding members of the distinguished publishing firm André Deutsch—until she learns, through the wisdom of work and words, to conjure something like happiness from the vagaries of love and the verities of time