O Love How Deep

After twenty-six-year-old Australian David Carpenter — a psychiatrist and neurological researcher himself — had a breakdown in his first year at Cambridge, his therapist told him, “Go into the Anglican Chaplaincy, investigate Christianity, and have a love-affair with a nice Christian girl.” He did precisely that.

Diana was only twenty. They grew so close that when, after four years, she married someone else, he returned home devastated. They did not meet again for eight years. He realised then that he still loved her, and she him. He asked her to break her marriage for him. Instead, she sent him away indefinitely.

In her last letter she begged him to give her up. She said that Oxford had rejected her dissertation. She was thirty-three, with her academic career now shattered. Vindication took 25 years.

This is the poignant true story of three hyper-intelligent, cosmopolitan, and highly-educated people fighting their way through to genuine faith, hope, and love in the modern world. It is about a real marriage and many assaults on it. Looking back, the author see herself as having been surrounded by love all her life.

She thinks of herself as a simple soul with a complicated mind.