Series of twenty-eight autograph and typed letters signed ("Olivia"), to her fellow novelist Anthony Powell ("Tony dear"), largely about their respective books, such as her The Doves of Venus and his Buyer's Market ("...I feel instinctively that you are right in finding something seriously wrong with it but I am afraid I have not yet got clear what you feel was wrong... You, I know, feel the fault was not in the subject but the treatment. Did you feel that I tended, at times, to be bitter?... It is rather painful to realise that I failed in this, and I have rather a horror of doing it again... About ʻA Buyer's Market' – I do not feel you have any reason to worry about this book. The trouble was that the critics failed to appreciate what you were doing..."), The Rain Forest ("...I am probably, foolishly, trying to write about the modern world and am depressed, bewildered and, more often than not, defeated. I should have been content to turn my trilogy into a quadpartite and not worry about the teenagers who think I write historical novels...") and the Balkan Trilogy ("...I am not sure that I agree with you about ʻputting real people in'. I feel they often resemble an original in spite of one's efforts to disguise them. My character, Yakimov, was based on a real person and I was so nervous of him – he was always in need of money – that I changed his every physical characteristic and made him a prince and half-Russian. I was sure I had avoided all risk of libel but a year or two ago a woman came up to me at a party and said that she and her husband had been greatly amused by the Balkan trilogy because they knew the original of Yakimov. I protested that she must be mistaken but she named the very man... the incident made me feel so ill I had to leave the party. In fact when I was sued, it was by a person I did not know existed and all my paper-backs were pulped..."); while his comments were generally appreciated ("...Your criticism is helpful & I will apply it to the next novel – still a very small embryo..."), at one point, after some comments made by him in a Muggeridge interview, she complains bitterly, while still calling him "Tony dear" and subscribing herself with "love" ("...I do wish you had told me long ago that you had such a low opinion of my work. Looking through your old letters to find your address, I could not help thinking how misleading were your past comments. It all makes for pain and shock..."), adding in a follow-up letter: "I have never received the sort of encouragement given to writers like Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark & Edna O'Brien & it is easy, if one has a background of insecurity, to feel that one has been wrong from the start... I am more than glad you spoke kindly of ʻSchool for Love'", a complaint she takes up in another letter ("...I review one batch of depressing novels after another. All the best ones, of course, are reviewed separately as yours are. Do you think I will ever reach the exalted state of being reviewed separately, like Iris M. or Muriel S.? Or am I just not good enough!..."); throughout the series she is unstinting in her praise of each of his novels as it comes out ("...You make Mr. Waugh seem unspeakably crude, and the overpraised Mr. Ames [sic] a blundering adolescent doing a comic turn..."), declaring that "The Music of Time will certainly live. It is an invaluable record of a certain class in a certain epoch. No one has done such a thing better. I am not sure anyone else has done it as well"; her admiration showing itself in reiterated requests that he inscribe books for her ("...Please put ʻAnthony Powell' on the title page so when, in the poverty of extreme old age, I sell them for a fortune at Sotheby's, people will know that the Tony is the real Tony, not some old cooked-up Tony of no importance at all. I have handed in my MS & am quite dull & exhausted. I longed to get it finished & now do not know what to do without it. I wish I had your gift for just going on. Do ring me when you are in London & let us have a talk abut the sufferings of novelists..."); other subjects discussed, including support for their fellow novelist William Gerhardi, Arts Council tours, and the like; 15 letters autograph, 13 typed; together with two letters by her biographer Neville Braybrooke thanking Powell for copies of the correspondence, over 50 pages, 4to and 8vo, London and elsewhere, 1956-1976