In the darkened sitting room of her 18-room Georgetown house, Sally Quinn—journalist, famed Washington hostess, and widow of longtime Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee —recently read a poem aloud. It was by Raymond Carver, and its final lines expressed what she wants most from her life: “To call myself beloved, to feel myself / beloved on the earth.” Quinn felt beloved in her marriage to Bradlee, and she misses that. Their love, she believes, had a spiritual quality. “Certainly, love is divine,” she told me. “Sex is divine. I mean, whoever invented it—whether it was God or whoever else—did a good job.”

At age 83, Quinn has written a new novel on this subject: Silent Retreat , which is half romance, half theological meditation. It follows a journalist who, fleeing her founder

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