Fifty years on, a voice that still touches the heart. GRAMOPHONE A vivid self-portrait of a brave, secure woman in love with life and music... Anyone interested in Kathleen Ferrier's life and art will find this welcome book required reading. It is above all, and despite the final descent, a celebration of living. JOHN TALBOT, BRITISH MUSIC SOCIETY NEWSLETTER On closing (this book) with a terrible sadness, I'm a fan too... These letters...chronicle everything, from whom she knocked around with - Britten, Pears, Barbirolli, Danny Kaye, Rex Harrison - to what she sang and what she greedily ate. FINANCIAL TIMES (Michael Church) Delightful letters and diaries. DAILY TELEGRAPH (Rupert Christiansen) 'Ferrier is a national icon, 2003 is the fiftieth anniversary of her cruelly early death. There is an aura about her name, posthumous image and memory that I think is going to make people want to buy these very human, unaffected, in hindsight moving letters... I read with a lump in my throat: Ferrier seems to be goodness incarnate, the most wonderful of all contraltos, beautiful and doomed.' BRUCE PHILLIPS, music editor Fifty years ago, Kathleen Ferrier, the greatest lyric contralto Britain has ever produced, lost her courageous battle with breast cancer. Her name endures to this day, for she struck a chord with a wide-ranging public - in concerts, on records and on the radio - despite a career which lasted barely ten years. Within a decade this former telephone exchange operator was singing on stage at Covent Garden or before royalty at private parties. She was surely fun to know: this collection of 300+ letters and twelve years of her personal diaries give a sunny picture of her life in the muted post-war years. Her indefinable personality was a mix of extreme modesty and self-determined ambition, and a mischievously blunt sense of earthy Lancastrian humour. Until now, Kathleen Ferrier has been a glorious voice, but through the pages of these fascinating letters and diaries, never previously published, we get to the real person. CHRISTOPHER FIFIELD is foremost a conductor, but also a writer on music history (Grove, DNB, Viking Opera Guide, Oxford Companion to Music), and the author of two biographies, of Bruch and Hans Richter.