Library of Wales: I Sent a Letter to My Love

Bernice Rubens was born in Cardiff in 1928, the second daughter of Eli Rubens, a Lithuanian Jew fleeing anti-semitism who established himself in the clothes business and Dorothy Cohen whose family had emigrated from Poland. She grew up in the large musical family in the vibrant Cardiff Jewish community. Music remained a passion throughout her life and sometimes she liked to describe herself as a failed musician. She was one of the most successful British novelists of the second half of the twentieth century and won the Booker prize in 1970 for The Elected Member. She read English at the University of Wales in Cardiff, before marrying Rudi Nassbauer, a wine merchant who also wrote poetry and fiction.Bernice Rubens had two daughters, taught English at a Birmingham grammar school from 1950 to 1955, before entering the film industry. Her documentaries were well received, one entitled Stress winning the American Blue Ribbon award in 1968. She began writing fiction based securely on the intricacies of her own Jewish family in her late twenties. She achieved early critical and commercial success with her first novel Set On Edge (1960) which allowed her to maintain a long career which would encompass 24 published novels. Her autobiography published in 2003 was her first work of non-fiction but she had often used incidents in her own life such the break up of her marriage in her work.Her second novel, Madame Sousatzka (1962), became a film starring Shirley MacLaine and directed by John Schlesinger; her seventh, I Sent A Letter To My Love (1975), was also filmed, with Simone Signoret.Rubens enjoyed the respected place she had achieved in the literary world. She was an honorary vice-president of International PEN and served as a Booker judge in 1986. She maintained close friendships with a chosen group of colleagues, including Beryl Bainbridge, Paul Bailey and Francis King.She was a compelling storyteller, weaving her novels from many strands: her own vivid experiences, her friends’ and family’s lives, centuries of Jewish tradition and history; above all, her remarkable and disturbing imagination. In everyday places - a suburban villa, an English public school, a home for the elderly - Rubens showed the horrors that can lie behind net curtains and cosiness, polite conversation or an unexplained wink. Though her novels possess many themes, she admitted that she really only wrote about one thing. Human relationships were the core material of her books, especially within a family. In later years her work moved to a larger historical canvas as she connected strongly with her Jewish heritage. She considered her strongest book to be Brothers, a sweeping historical novel that follows several generations of a Jewish family through a fight for survival that takes them from 19th-century Tsarist Russia to western Europe and Nazism, then back to modern Russia and its continued persecution of the Jews. It was the best she insisted: “because... what it is about matters”.She died in London in 2004.

Reissued here as part of the Library of Wales series, Bernice Ruben’s 1975 classic is possibly the most extraordinary and affecting novel I have ever read. The intensity of Ruben’s writing and psychological insight simply takes your breath away, as the story gradually shapeshifts from its quiet, conventional beginnings into a darkly surreal portrayal of love and dependency.Amy Evans has always known she is ugly. She has been told so since she was very young, not least by her mother, whose love was entirely focused on Amy’s sickly brother, Stan, with his ‘pale imploring beauty’. Fortunately, Amy has an anarchic streak that gets her through, though it also gets her into trouble. When their parents die, Amy is left to care for Stan, who is now wheelchair-bound. They live in the family home, continuing the family patterns: Amy is as angry and eaten away by resentment as their mother, while Stan is quietly uncomplaining like their father. With little sense of her self beyond her caring role, Amy is torn between two fears – that Stan will ‘subjugate her with kindness, enslave her with his martyrdom’ and that he will die, leaving her alone, and ‘there would only be the cleaning left once Stan had gone, and who would make the house dirty for her to clean it again?’ Determined to escape the monotony of her existence, Amy puts an ad in the classified column of the local newspaper. When she receives a response, her life changes forever, and so does Stan’s.The acuity of Ruben’s perception of human relationships is persistently startling. She has an almost disturbing ability to capture the nuances of a single interaction or event, often using a beautiful, wry humour to soften the combination of compassion and contempt that underlies intimate relationships. Again and again, she paints scenes that are as funny as they are sad in their depiction of our inclination to deceive both others and ourselves. This is a unique and brilliant book.