The World’s Greatest Love Letters

by Various Authors

Genres: Anthologies

Synopsis

An elevated, gifty anthology of love letters from history’s most passionate romantics.

This beautiful volume features love letters from a variety of people throughout history, including Heloise and Abelard, Henry VIII, Margaret of Valois, Napoleon Bonaparte, Mary Wollstonecraft, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, John Keats, Robert Browning, and Mary, Queen of Scots. Contents are organized thematically in chapters such as Mad Love, Bad Love, and The World’s Greatest Lover (John Keats, of course).

Release date: December 6, 2022

Publisher: Union Square & Co.

Print pages: 320

Sample

“Heaven is unchangeable. Who can say so of love and letters?” When Henrietta Howard, Countess of Suffolk, made this observation in a letter to Lord Peterborough early in the eighteenth century, she could scarcely have known that the enamored lord’s love letters, and her responses to them, would centuries hence be a significant part of the legacy by which she is remembered. She’s not alone in that regard. Many famous men and women of the past are remembered today almost exclusively for the love letters they wrote, or that were written to them.

If love letters are not as old as love itself, then they are certainly as old as the art of letter writing. They comprise a literary subgenre more than a thousand years old, and they represent the work not only of esteemed men and women of arts and letters, but also of royals, statesmen, clergy, soldiers, politicians, scientists, philosophers, and others.

The World’s Greatest Love Letters celebrates the love letter as a literary form, and love itself as an emotion that draws out from the lovestruck humor, pathos, poignance, charm, wit, and other attributes that distinguish and define our humanity. The letters I have selected for inclusion here represent, to my mind, many of the greatest expressions of love ever committed to paper. Their eloquence and passion are undeniable, and often quite surprising, considering their sources. We would expect memorable love letters from Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats, and other poets who regularly grappled with strong feelings in their verse, but who would have thought Napoleon Bonaparte to be such a passionate romantic, who regularly dashed off torrid mash notes to his beloved wife Josephine in the midst of his many battle campaigns. Henry VIII, who engineered the executions of two of his six wives, is usually regarded as one of history’s most heartless tyrants, yet the letters in which he courts one of those unfortunates, Anne Boleyn, reveal a monarch chastened by love and subservient to the affections of his intended. Poet Alexander Pope seemed to be incapable of writing anything that did not reflect the cool reason of the Age of Enlightenment that his writings epitomized, so how startling to read his missive to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in which he expresses “a burning desire to see your soul stark naked.”

I have grouped the letters selected into twelve very subjectively defined sections, determined solely by how we, viewing them from a modern perspective, might categorize their outpourings of sentiment. “Refined Love” features letters whose writers are as much concerned with discussing love in the abstract as making love to their recipients. There are letters of platonic love, and in the case of Mary Wollstonecraft’s letter to Captain Gilbert Imlay, an early letter in an exchange that would grow more passionate over time. Some of the most heartfelt but saddest letters are grouped in the category “Unrequited Love,” whose writers pine for lovers that they know will never love them as they do, or even reciprocate affection. At least one of these exchanges had a happy ending: Victor Hugo courted Adèle Foucher through letters until his disapproving mother died, after which he married her. “Playful Love” features some of the most whimsically romantic letters ever written, while “Reverential Love” shows how, for some romantics, love was tantamount to religious experience, and even inseparable from their religious beliefs. The category entitled “Adoring Love” speaks for itself: the letters gathered here are outspoken in their declarations of love, and the volatile passions they express are hampered only by the limitations of their syntax. The letters in “Married Love” capture couples whose love was consummated, or intended to culminate, in matrimony. It includes Sir Walter Raleigh’s heartrending letter to his wife, in which he extols his love for her and their children with his execution imminent. Also included is Lord Nelson’s wistful expression of marriage in the future to Lady Emma Hamilton, a union that did not occur before Nelson was killed at the Battle of Trafalgar in the Napoleonic Wars.

In a few rare instances, letter writers and their recipients were equally articulate in their exchanges. These letters are grouped in call-and-response fashion in the category “Loving Couples.” Included here are several exchanges between Lord Peterborough and Henrietta Howard, outtakes from one of the wittiest exchanges of amorous repartee on record, and letters exchanged between Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, whose courtship in letters would fill an entire volume. The letters exchanged by Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland and his lover Lady Grosvenor are especially interesting, if only because they became evidence in a suit brought against the duke for “criminal conversation” (i.e., adultery) with his lover. The letters in “Long-Distance Love” are full of the tortured emotions of lovers separated geographically from one another by their duties and responsibilities. Some are written by military leaders from the battlefield; many of their despondent writers are unaware that they have just missed a letter posted by their lover. “Mad Love” is often hard to distinguish from “Bad Love,” but in both of these categories letter writers voice feelings that incline toward the morbid and self-destructive. Affairs often end badly for one or both lovers, and letters capturing their regrets appear in “Love on the Rocks.”

In “The World’s Greatest Lover,” I group a selection of letters by the writer whose love letters I feel distinguish him as the most sincerely romantic writer of all time. Spoiler alert: it’s the poet John Keats, whose love for Fanny Brawne was reciprocated, but never consummated. When the young Keats met Fanny, he was dying of tuberculosis and the imminence of death doubtless contributed to his letters’ honesty of feeling and lack of pretense. Keats moved to Italy shortly before his death, and found himself incapable of writing to Fanny in the ensuing months. His last letter to a friend, asking for a report back on her and her welfare, is emotionally devastating.

Fanny’s letters to Keats do not exist, because Keats asked that they be destroyed after his death. His wish is a reminder to us that the letters we read in this volume were private, and never intended to be shared with any others but their recipients. As such, their writers—even those who published regularly—often threw off the yoke of dignified reserve, to express their feelings with uncommon candor and intensity. These letters offer a secret glimpse into the thoughts and feelings of those emboldened to put into words that most delicate and mystifying of all sentiments—love.

—Stefan Dziemianowicz

New York, 2022  





Alexander Pope to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1716)

The more I examine my own mind, the more romantic I find myself. Methinks it is a noble spirit of contradiction to fate and fortune, not to give up those that are snatched from us, but to follow them with warmer zeal, the further they are removed from the sense of it.

Sure flattery never travelled so far as three thousand miles; it is now only for truth, which overtakes all things, to reach you at this distance. It is a generous piece of popery that pursues even those who are to be eternally absent, into another world; let it be right or wrong, the very extravagance is a sort of piety.

I cannot be satisfied with strewing flowers over you, and barely honouring you as a thing lost; but must consider you as a glorious though remote being, and be sending messages and prayers after you. You have carried away so much of my esteem that what remains of it is daily languishing and dying over my acquaintance here; and, I believe, in three or four months more, I shall think Aurat-bassar as good a place as Covent Garden. . . .

I write this in some anger; for, having frequented those people most, since you went, who seemed most in your favour. I heard nothing that concerned you talked of so often as that you went away in a black full-bottom, which I did but assert to be a bob, and was answered—love is blind. I am persuaded your wig had never suffered the criticism, but on the score of your head, and the two fine eyes that are in it.

For God’s sake, madam, when you write to me, talk of yourself; there is nothing I so much desire to hear of; talk a great deal of yourself, that she who I always thought talked best may speak upon the best subject.

The shrines and reliques you tell me of no way engage my curiosity; I had ten times rather go on pilgrimage to see your face, than St. John Baptist’s head.

. . . I doubt not but I shall be told when I come to follow you through those countries, in how pretty a manner you accommodated yourself to the customs of the true believers. . . . But if my fate be such, that this body of mine (which is as ill-matched to my mind, as any wife to her husband) be left behind in the journey, let the epitaph of Tibullus be set over it:—

Here, stopped by hasty death, Alexis lies,

Who crossed half Europe, led by Wortley’s eyes.

I shall at least be sure to meet you in the next world, if there be any truth in our new doctrine of the day of judgment. Since your body is so full of fire, and capable of such solar notions as your letter describes, your soul can never be long going to the fixed stars, where I intend to settle; or else you may find me in the milky way; because Fontenelle assures us, the stars are so crowded there, that a man may stand upon one and talk to his friend on another. From thence, with a good telescope, what do you think one should take such a place as this world for? I fancy, for the devil’s rookery, where the inhabitants are ready to deafen and destroy one another with eternal noise and hunger. . . . I can only add my desire of being always thought yours, and of being told I am thought so by yourself whenever you would make me as happy as I can be at this distance.



Samuel Johnson to Mrs. Thrale (1777)

Dearest Madam,

You talk of writing and writing, as if you had all the writing to yourself. If our correspondence were printed, I am sure posterity—for posterity is always the author’s favourite—would say that I am a good writer too. To sit down so often with nothing to say,—to say something so often, almost without consciousness of saying and without any remembrance of having said,—is a power of which I will not violate my modesty by boasting; but I do not believe everybody has it.

Some, when they write to their friends, are all affection, some wise and sententious, some strain their powers for efforts of gaiety, some write news, and some write secrets; but to make a letter without affection, without wisdom, without gaiety, without news, and without a secret, is, doubtless, the great epistolic art.

In a man’s letters, you know, madam, his soul lies naked. His letters are only the mirror of his heart. Whatever passes within him is there shown undisguised in its natural progress; nothing is invented, nothing distorted; you see systems in their elements, you discover actions in their motives.

Of this great truth, sounded by the knowing to the ignorant, and so echoed by the ignorant to the knowing, what evidence have you now before you? Is not my soul laid open before you in these veracious pages? Do you not see me reduced to my first principles? This is the pleasure of corresponding with a friend, where doubt and distrust have no place, and everything is said as it is thought. These are the letters by which souls are united, and by which minds naturally in unison move each other as they are moved themselves. I know, dearest lady, that in the perusal of this—such is the consanguinity of our intellects—you will be touched as I am touched. I have indeed concealed nothing from you, nor do I ever expect to repent of having thus opened my heart. I am, &c.,

Samuel Johnson



Robert Burns to Ellison Begbie (1780)

I have often thought it a peculiarly unlucky circumstance in love, that though in every other situation in life telling the truth is not only the safest, but actually by far the easiest way of proceeding, a lover is never under greater difficulty in acting, nor never more puzzled for expression than when his passion is sincere and his intentions are honourable.

I do not think that it is very difficult for a person of ordinary capacity to talk of love and fondness which are not felt, and to make vows of constancy and fidelity which are never intended to be performed, if he be villain enough to practise such detestable conduct; but to a man whose heart glows with the principles of integrity and truth, and who sincerely loves a woman of amiable person, uncommon refinement of sentiment, and purity of manners, to such a one in such circumstances, I can assure you my dear, from my own feelings at this present moment, courtship is a task indeed. There is such a number of foreboding fears and distrustful anxieties crowd into my mind when I am in your company, or when I sit down to write to you, that what to speak or what to write I am altogether at a loss.

There is one rule which I have hitherto practised and which I shall invariably keep with you and that is, honestly to tell you the plain truth. There is something so mean and unmanly in the acts of dissimulation and falsehood that I am surprised they can be acted by any one in so noble, so generous a passion as virtuous love. No, my dear E., I shall never endeavour to gain your favour by such detestable practices. If you will be so good and so generous as to admit me for your partner, your companion, your bosom friend through life, there is nothing on this side of eternity shall give me greater transport: but I shall never think of purchasing your hand by any arts unworthy of a man, and, I will add, of a Christian.

There is one thing my dear, which I earnestly request of you and it is this that you should soon either put an end to my hopes by a peremptory refusal or cure me of my fears by a generous consent.

It would oblige me much if you would send me a line or two when convenient. I shall only add further that if a behaviour regulated (though perhaps but very imperfectly) by the rules of honour, and virtue of a heart devoted to love and esteem you, and an earnest endeavour to promote your happiness—if these are qualities you would wish in a friend, in a husband, I hope you shall ever find them in your real friend and sincere lover,

R. B.



Horace Walpole to the Two Misses Berry (1789)

I have received at once most kind letters from you both, too kind, for you both talk of gratitude. Mercy on me! which is the obliged, and which is the gainer? Two charming beings, whom everybody likes and approves, and who yet can be pleased with the company and conversation and old stories of a Methusalem? or I, who at the end of my days have fallen into more agreeable society than ever I knew at any period of my life? I will say nothing of your persons, sense, or accomplishments, but where, united with all those, could I find so much simplicity, void of pretensions and affectation? This from any other man would sound like compliment and flattery; but in me, who have appointed myself your guardian, it is a duty to tell you of your merits, that you may preserve and persevere in them. If ever I descry any faults, I will tell you as freely of them. Be just what you are, and you may dare my reproofs.

I will restrain even reproaches, tho’ in jest, if it puts my sweet Agnes to the trouble of writing when she does not care for it. It is the extreme quality of my affection for both that makes me jealous if I do not receive equal tokens of friendship from both; and though nothing is more just than the . . .