In Love and War: A Letter to My Parents Book

At a cursory glance it is easy to mistake Maria Corelli's In Love and War for a spin-off from Louis de Bernières' Captain Corelli's Mandolin. A quote from de Bernières extolling the virtues of the book dominates a cover that is, shall we say, Corelli-esque. What lurks behind the jacket is however, something quite different. In Love and War is a copy of an actual letter Maria Corelli (or Mary Leslie, as she was then) wrote from Rome to her parents in Sussex during the summer of 1944. It was her first letter home in almost four years and, as it emerges, she had more than a few things to tell them. When the Second World War began Maria and her husband Lewis were studying music in Rome. It was here that they had met and befriended the talented Jewish-Romanian singer Sigbert Steinfeld. Italy entered the war in 1940 and Steinfeld was promptly sent to a concentration camp in Calabria, while Maria and Lewis, who narrowly avoided being interred themselves, struggled to find work, decent lodgings and food in a city increasingly suspicious of foreigners. The three were eventually reunited in Piscinisco two years later but were soon forced into hiding when the Germans invaded. It was while camped in "a shallow hollow in the rocks high up in the mountains" that Maria and Sigbert fell madly in love. Incredibly Lewis, afraid that his appearance might compromise their safety, suggested that the pair made their own way to Rome posing as an Italian couple. In Rome they were to find that friends of this calibre were slightly thinner on the ground. The prose is decidedly clunky, but the rough quality of the language does not diminish Corelli's powerful document, if anything it enhances it. Her unadorned and clearly un-amended account of a love affair flourishing amidst the chaos of war-torn Italy is disarmingly candid, and for that reason very moving. Less impressive is an appendix of entries from her dream journals of the period. Budding psychoanalysts might enjoy them but it's hard to see how they illuminate the letter that precedes them.--Travis Elborough.Read More