Used book – Frances & Bernard, Carlene Bauer

This is, first and foremost, a love story. It begins in the summer of 1957, at a writing workshop: Frances Reardon, a penniless aspiring novelist, meets the charming Bernard Elliot, a well-born and already established poet.

At the end of the summer, the first letter is sent. They must write to each other, and perhaps meet again, to resume the conversations left unfinished. Their exchange will last ten years.

Initially reserved and fragile, their writing becomes more liberated as their correspondence progresses and they reunite in New York. Together, they will explore the limits of faith, literature, passion, reason, and sacrifice. But while they are madly in love, living together is not easy. Bernard is a tormented man, and Frances wants to be free. Can one love to the point of losing oneself in another? What should one give up for love? Or to become an accomplished artist?

Very loosely inspired by the friendly relationship between two figures of American literature, the poet Robert Lowell and the novelist Flannery O'Connor, this epistolary novel possesses incomparable grace.