She belonged to the unlucky generation that had to live through two world wars – one in youth, and the other in old age – and the outbreak of the second, which as a passionate anti-fascist she had long foreseen, pressed very hard upon her. Donald was killed in a street accident in the blackout early in 1940, and soon afterwards I was sent abroad.

She wrote and wrote. Much of her time was spent with John Buchan’s widow, working on the two volumes commemorating him – The Clearing House (1946) and John Buchan by His Wife and Friends (1947) – both of which owe much to her. She began collecting materials for the life of Calvin. She also worked on an autobiography which she did not live to complete but was published in 1950 under the title Lying Awake. She died in 1946.

Although, as I have said, she was a woman of many friends and kept her friendships alive by the systematic and copious writing of letters, she rather avoided what might be called the routine of social life. More and more, in order to get her writing done, she would hire some out-of-the-way room into which she escaped from chance visitors and phone calls, keeping its address secret even from those she knew best. And much as she venerated her craft of writing, and dedicated as she was to it, she was singularly free of the feeling that writers deserve any special respect. To have a name, she accepted, was important, but in no more important a sense than a shop needs a name if it is to have customers. And she was much happier (despite her fondness for company she really liked) prowling round Kentish Town for odd books, curious furniture or second-hand pieces of costume than at a party.

One can detect a great deal of this in the Joanna of her novel, who is more interested in the strange, sad Mr and Mrs Moon and their family than in her smart cousin Irene. She never really considers what is going to happen to her hopeless commitment to Louis, and the final scene on the moor could not better express the absence of calculation that was so characteristic of the author. Although Lawrence had doubts about the closing passages of the book, and felt that they really belonged to a different novel, they seem to me to bring together the book’s many themes in a final scene of great force and power, equal to the best she ever wrote.