Introduction

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children and the Malinowski family were never broken. Mim too left Australia
for Europe, and in due course married a Viennese.
Elsie knew before she married Bronio that she was not facing a calm,
predictable future but that it would be an interesting one. There was a
fundamental difference in the way each one handled life day-to-day, both in
human relations and in practical matters. His was an anxious character, one of
contradictions and discrepancies; hers was much more a unity. His outstanding
intellect and irritability without end meant that he simply could not suffer
fools, or those he perceived as fools, at all. Her sense of humour gave balance
to her judgements and she was often able to limit the damage in his relations
with others.
The early years of their life together were full of the variety and movement
that his restlessness craved. When in 1924, some five years after they had
married, the symptoms of Elsies illness made their first appearance neither
she nor Bronio seem to have taken them very seriously; they went on with the
curiously divided life they had just begun, she in their house in north Italy with
two and then three children, he teaching at the London School of Economics,
travelling for his work and his career, and coming home in the intervals. He
had a crowded, animated life that suited him.
Her disease worsened and was firmly diagnosed as multiple sclerosis in
1928, but the family did not start a united life in London for another year, and
there too Bronio was often away. It is his mouvement life of course that we
have to thank for the existence of their many letters.
Elsie too undertook her own travels as she searched in vain for a cure for her
condition, and she did not try to keep Bronio from his meetings, lectures and
engagements in three continents, which she knew were essential to him.
Despite her illness, despite Bronios many absences, within all the changes
their marriage contained, but also with the knowledge that they both loved
each other, Elsie created for the whole family a life of remarkable harmony and
continuity that could not be reconstructed after the tragedy of her death.