Free 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff Page A

that Hanff remained unmarried due to this naval officer’s death. No such person is mentioned in her autobiographical Underfoot in Show Business and none of her writings suggests that she ever had any lasting, or even short-term, romantic relationship with any person. In Duchess she confides to her diary that she was irritated by “a lot of togetherness” with one of her male English fans who had taken her to Stratford-upon-Avon and Oxford on a two-day driving trip. This implies that Hanff preferred her own company and had no need of a life partner. Her relationship with Frank Doel, warm as it was, was entirely literary.
    —Wikipedia
    See also: New York Times Obituary

Helene Hanff, Wry Epistler Of ‘84 Charing,’ Dies at 80
Obituary—New York Times
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: April 11, 1997
    Helene Hanff, whose wittily acerbic 20-year correspondence with a London bookseller she never met won her a passionate following after it was published as the epistolary memoir 84, Charing Cross Road , died on Wednesday [9 April, 1997] at the De Witt Nursing Home in Manhattan. She was 80.
    Up to the book’s publication in 1970, Ms. Hanff was a relatively unheralded freelance writer whose work centered mainly on television screenplays and children’s books. But the letters she addressed to the antiquarian bookshop Marks & Co. from 1949 to 1969, with their shared confidences and affectionate needling along with orders for Jane Austen and Izaak Walton, brought her a small if unanticipated literary celebrity.
    Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Thomas Lask wrote: “Here is a charmer: a 19th-century book in a 20th-century world. It will beguile an hour of your time and put you in tune with mankind.”
    From the beginning of her correspondence, Ms. Hanff ignored the niceties of business letter writing. “WHAT KIND OF A PEPYS’ DIARY DO YOU CALL THIS?,” she bellowed in an eccentrically capitalized letter of Oct. 15, 1951, after receiving a Marks & Co. shipment. “this is not pepys’ diary, this is some busybody editor’s miserable collection of EXCERPTS from pepys’ diary may he rot. i could just spit. where is jan. 12, 1668, where his wife chased him out of bed and round the bedroom with a red-hot poker?”
    In his replies, Frank Doel, the shop’s chief buyer and Ms. Hanff’s principal correspondent, strove at first to maintain what she called his “proper British reserve.” But little by little, Ms. Hanff wore him down, as she did the other members of the shop’s staff. They sent her recipes for Yorkshire pudding. She sent them food parcels and nylon stockings in a one-woman crusade to ameliorate Britain’s postwar shortages. And Ms. Hanff often tempered her trans-Atlantic crankiness with rhapsodic soliloquies over the orders that Marks & Co. managed to get right.
    “The Newman arrived almost a week ago and I’m just beginning to recover,” she wrote in 1950 after buying a first edition of John Henry Newman’s “Idea of a University” (1852) for $6. “I feel vaguely guilty about owning it. All that gleaming leather and gold stamping and beautiful type belongs in the pine-paneled library of an English country home; it wants to be read by the fire in a gentleman’s leather easy chair—not on a secondhand studio couch in a one-room hovel in a broken-down brownstone front.”
    Despite her origins south of the Battery—she was a native of Philadelphia—Ms. Hanff was the Platonic New Yorker to her enchanted London correspondents. Her letters are a window on days spent picnicking in Central Park, rooting ardently for the Dodgers (and later the Mets) and wading into the fray of local politics (she was the first woman to serve as president of the Lenox Hill Democratic Club).
    A constant undercurrent in Ms. Hanff’s letters was the hand-to-mouth writing life she led, working at home in “moth-eaten sweaters” with an overflowing ashtray at her elbow and the gin bottle never far from reach. Despite repeated