Collection of Laurie Lee love letters sold at auction (From Stroud News and Journal)

Collection of Laurie Lee love letters sold at auction

11:00am Wednesday 7th July 2010 in News By Rachel Clare

A COLLECTION of letters written by Laurie Lee – which reveal he was involved in a love triangle with two sisters – sold for more than £1,700 at auction on Monday.

It seems that when the novelist and poet wrote Cider with Rosie, charting his early life in Slad, he omitted to mention his rather complicated relationship with Molly and Betty Smart.

Details have only just emerged, 13 years after the author's death, with the discovery of some previously unpublished letters.

It was already known that Lee had enjoyed a chaste relationship with youngest sister Betty when he was growing up in the village near Stroud but it seems there was also a second relationship, with Molly.

The letters, written by Lee to Molly between 1932 and 1941, told her she had 'power in her eyes and her body'.

One begins: "Damn no. I can think of nothing more miserable than a 'polite acquaintance pact'. It would be absolutely unbearable. Rather than that should happen, I'd run for miles and never see you again."

In another early letter he writes: "My hands were very alive, I remember that, alive and sensitive, and they touched and remembered other hands...

"Since I left Slad I have begun to feel for myself unconsciously and unquestioningly, because I began to feel that at last I was myself.

"I feel strangely certain about life this morning. I know that you have a power in your eyes and your body... Oh, don't ever marry, Molly."

The letters were written when Molly was an aspiring young writer encouraging Lee in his early poetry.

However, in the 1990s her sister Betty told the author of Lee's biography, Valerie Grove, that she had also enjoyed an innocent relationship with the poet.

In the book, Laurie Lee: The Well-loved Stranger, published in 1999, Betty, then an 82-year-old widow, said: "In those days it was all so innocent, an idyllic boy-girl relationship.

"We were sweethearts but it meant nothing more than a chaste goodnight kiss."

The last two letters in the collection, written by Lee from Sussex in 1941, sold at Lawrences of Crewkerne in Somerset for £1,790 to an anonymous bidder.

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