The Dolphin Letters 19701979, by Saskia Hamilton

HAMISH ROBINSON The Dolphin Letters 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell and Their Circle

In 1970, the 53-year-old poet Robert Lowell, then married to the writer Elizabeth Hardwick and living in New York, travelled to England to take up a fellowship at All Souls.

At a party in London, he met and fell in love with Lady Caroline Blackwood, the former wife of Lucian Freud. Lowell immediately moved in with Blackwood, who was living in a flat in Redcliffe Square with her three small children.

Lowell’s series of anodyne letters to Hardwick and their teenage daughter Harriet in New York make no mention of these new arrangements. However, Hardwick sensed something was wrong, and feared that Lowell, who was regularly hospitalised for manic depression, was about to suffer one of his more or less annual bouts of mania.

Rumours also reached her that Lowell had taken up with another woman. When she finally heard that it was Caroline Blackwood, whom she and Lowell had encountered some years before in New York, she laughed, assuming that this new amour was merely a symptom. In former manic phases, Lowell had declared his love for a series of younger women whom he hardly knew.

But Lowell had fallen in love with Caroline Blackwood in his right mind: their feelings were mutual, his intentions serious. To complicate matters further, Lowell then suffered a bout of mania and was hospitalised in London. Blackwood, who had her own fragility, fled with her children to Ireland. The practised Hardwick flew in from New York to support him. Hardwick flew home,