On 8th October 1953 the greatest lyric contralto Britain has ever produced died of cancer after a career which lasted barely ten years. She was Kathleen Ferrier and her name was known to millions. As a young boy in the early 1950s, I can remember listening to the radio on days off school and hearing her sing ‘What is Life?’, ‘Blow the Wind Southerly’ or ‘The Keel Row’ on the Light Programme in the morning, while that same evening she might well have been heard on the more serious Third Programme singing Messiah or Dream of Gerontius from the Albert Hall, or giving a song recital from Broadcasting House on the Home Service. So, if the breadth of her repertoire might be described as limited compared to a soprano (rather than by any reluctance on her part to learn new works), the range of its appeal was widespread. Nearly six decades after her premature death, her name lives on, but it means different things to different generations. My illustrated talk, ‘The Life and Voice of Kathleen Ferrier,’ has been given 160 times over the past eight years, but it is requested by those now in retirement; to a younger generation, even of musicians, Kathleen Ferrier is associated with the International Singing Competition bearing her name since it began in 1956, and which regrettably is rarely entered or won by a contralto.

This book is not a biography. There have been three since her death as well as a Memoir to which her closest artistic friends contributed, among them conductors Sir John Barbirolli and Bruno Walter, critic Neville Cardus and composer Benjamin Britten. Nor does this book list her recordings as these have been well documented in recent years. It is simply a collection of letters, most of which Kathleen Ferrier wrote between 1940 and 1953, to close friends, relatives, agents, managers, organisers, musicians and fans both at home and abroad; her surviving diaries (1942–1953); letters to and from the BBC; and some final tributes. Once each year is introduced there is no need for further comment, as her bluntly honest, open-hearted Northern character speaks for itself.