The return to the Fair Helen Inn in Dilys Powell’s postwar travels to Greece

Abstract

ABSTRACT Dilys Powell, one of the most famous British film critics of the mid-twentieth century, recounted her travels in Greece in several books, fusing autobiography, history, and travel writing. In her postwar travelogue, An Affair of the Heart, Powell presents her wanderings and hotel stays in Greece in 1945, 1953, and 1954, during a period of civil conflict and its devastating aftermath. From the officer’s hotel in Salonika to the Fair Helen Inn at Mycenae in 1945, after the liberation and on the eve of the Civil War, Powell views Greece through the imagery of ruins: the ruins in the archaeological excavations of her husband Humfry Payne, who died in Greece in 1936, but also the physical rubbles and shattered lives of war-torn Greece. Revisiting the country after the Civil War, Powell turns her travels into a story about continuity and destruction, memory and forgetting, trauma and healing.