Three lives, many letters …

… The Mysterious Letter Writer Who Beguiled Flannery O’Connor and Iris Murdoch - The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… this was Hazel Elizabeth Hester, a file clerk at Atlanta’s Retail Credit Company, now the credit-reporting giant Equifax. Murdoch and Hester, who called herself Betty, corresponded for more than thirty years, until the onset of Alzheimer’s disease made it impossible for Murdoch to reply. Even then, John Bayley, Murdoch’s husband, asked Hester to continue. “She loveshearing from you,” Bayley wrote Hester in January, 1997, “and she sends loving greeting. Please go on writing to her because it means a lot to her—a really very great deal.”