‘Dearest Squirrel…’: The Intimate Letters of John Osborne and Pamela Lane

A completely fresh insight into the mind of one of the UK’s greatest playwrights, the letters between John Osborne and his first wife, actress Pamela Lane, are also a love letter to a now defunct system of repertory theatre, and life in post-war Britain.

As these letters reveal, soon after their divorce, Osborne and Lane began a mutually supportive, loyal, frequently stormy and sometimes sexually intimate alliance lasting thirty years until Osborne’s death. By the mid-1980s, they had become closer and more trusting than they had been since their earliest years together. ‘You are for me what you always were,’ Pamela told him, ‘I am in love with you still.’ It is, he declared, ‘my fortune to have loved someone for a lifetime.’

Acerbic, witty, candid and heartbreaking, they reveal a unique relationship, troubled, tender and enduring.