Letter from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Delhi, India, to James Ivory, New York, New York, 1969 June 25 : autograph manuscript signed.

Telling Ivory that the Jhabvala's dog Nixi died that morning, and describing the dog's grave in the back garden and her childrens' grief; wondering how Ivory's meeting with Lynn Redgrave went, and musing on her preference for a slightly older actor for "Passion" and her wariness of "these young English actresses, who've some up quick with little experience"; saying she doesn't "like the idea, as I said before, of doing 'Passion' without the diary"; voicing her preference for not doing adaptations of her short stories "A Bad Woman" or "The Widow" because of their narrow scope; musing that films seen to have taken the place of novels in the present world, and few contemporary novels can capture "what it's like to be alive in this world at this time" in the way that Turgenev's "Smoke" or Hardy's "Trumpet-Major" or even Dreiser's "Financier" did; admitting she has made two attempts to write a teleplay, but gave up out of boredom with the lack of scope, and realizing that it's scope she wants, and which "A Lovely World," the Shashi-Jennifer film ["Bombay Talkie"], and "Passion" (with the diary) all have; asserting "I'd like to write films the way I used to write novels; I used to write novels without pause, thowing myself into one after another, as one after another came surging up full of interest & promise to me. That's the way you [underlined] ought to be able to make films now. Money, money!"