Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Love Letters of Great Men and Women - From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day
    Love Letters of Great Men and Women - From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day
    Love Letters of Great Men and Women - From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day
    Ebook425 pages6 hours

    Love Letters of Great Men and Women - From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day

    By C. H. Charles

    5/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateApr 18, 2013
    ISBN9781447499244
    Love Letters of Great Men and Women - From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day

    Related to Love Letters of Great Men and Women - From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day

    Related ebooks

    Language Arts & Discipline For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Mary Wollstonecraft

      Nov 1, 2017

      Mary Wollstonecraft
      6 min read

    • Article

      Exhaustively Researched, Often Brilliant Biography Of Sylvia Plath

      Nov 7, 2020

      ALMOST six decades after her death, Sylvia Plath stands as the most consequential poet of her generation. As a feminine voice, she dominates the 20th century. At the time of Plath’s death at age 30, critic A Alvarez wrote: “The loss to literature is

      13 min read

    • Article

      Armchair Dramatics

      May 6, 2020

      Armchair Dramatics
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Kings and Queens of Hearts

      Sep 2, 2021

      The Kings and Queens of Hearts
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Foul-mouthed Miller And The Prim Prioress

      Jan 3, 2024

      HAT Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘drasty rhyming is nat worth a toord’ (his ‘dirty rhyming isn’t worth a turd’), the Host’s pungent dismissal in Chaucer’s best-known, but incomplete poem The Canterbury Tales, is a verdict that, with good reason, posterity has

      4 min read

    • Article

      Worldly Observations

      Nov 1, 2022

      Worldly Observations
      6 min read

    • Article

      All You Need Is Love

      Jan 24, 2023

      All You Need Is Love
      7 min read

    • Article

      Crazy For Cider

      Aug 25, 2021

      JAMES CROWDEN is a poet, shepherd and total cider nut. In this, at least his third book on the subject, there is no other drink but that it suffers from his passion for cider, apple brandy and cider’s delicate, sweet sister, perry—and almost no momen

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Old Un's Notes

      Jul 26, 2023

      ✽ ‘Given sufficient notice, one can always be spontaneous.’ If this saying reminds you of Oscar Wilde, it’s entirely appropriate. With this aphorism, Robert Eddison has won the fourth Wilde Wit Competition run by the Oscar Wilde Society, in partnersh

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Landscape Was His Mistress

      Feb 9, 2022

      IN 1802, John Constable wrote seven observations and resolutions about art. In them, among other things, he pledged to follow Nature, to make ‘unaffected’ pictures, and to avoid ‘common place people’. He also declared that ‘there is no easy way of be

      5 min read

    • Article

      A New Golden Age

      Oct 5, 2022

      A New Golden Age
      8 min read

    • Article

      England’s Fair And Pleasant Land

      Feb 23, 2023

      JONATHAN DUKE-EVANS TELLS US that the first recorded use of the phrase “fair play” is to be found in an obscure mid-fourteenth-century poem called Titus & Vespasian. Having taken their leave and went their way, “He thanked [t]hem of [t]here faire pla

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Old Un’s Notes

      Sep 22, 2021

      The Old Un’s Notes
      5 min read

    • Article

      Jan Ladislav Dussek

      Oct 3, 2023

      Jan Ladislav Dussek
      7 min read

    • Article

      England’s Fair And Pleasant Land

      Feb 23, 2023

      JONATHAN DUKE-EVANS TELLS US that the first recorded use of the phrase “fair play” is to be found in an obscure mid-fourteenth-century poem called Titus & Vespasian. Having taken their leave and went their way, “He thanked [t]hem of [t]here faire pla

      4 min read

    • Article

      Unravelling Ravel

      Aug 5, 2021

      Unravelling Ravel
      7 min read

    • Article

      True Romantic

      Apr 2, 2020

      True Romantic
      3 min read

    • Article

      Pioneering Fairytale Author Madame D'Aulnoy Back In Print After Centuries

      Dec 21, 2020

      A story by Madame d’Aulnoy, the 17th-century French writer who coined the term “fairytales”, is to be published in English for the first time in more than 300 years, telling of a woman whose beauty is so great it slays her lovers by the hundreds. Mar

      2 min read

    • Article

      A Back In Time

      Apr 5, 2019

      A Back In Time
      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Love Letters of Great Men and Women - From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day

    5/5

    2 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      I loved this collection of love letters, as they are possibly the most private and intimate thoughts of these talented individuals!Two of my favorites:1)Victor Hugo in 1821 (just a snippet: This is the love which you inspire in me....Your soul is made to love with the purity and passions of angels;....."2)Duff Cooper in 1918 (just a snippet: ...that I never see beauty without thinking of you or scent happiness without thinking of you"There are many great letters in this book and recommend it to any hopeful/hopeless romantic out there!

    Book preview

    Love Letters of Great Men and Women - From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day - C. H. Charles

    all.

    THE AGE OF GOOD SENSE

    The Classic period in England: its urbanity, its love of good sense and moderation, its instinctive distrust of emotion, and its invincible good breeding.

    ALEXANDER POPE

    (1688–1744)

    THE controversy whether Pope was a poet has long been laid to rest. His work is the most perfect expression in our literature of the classical theories of poetry. He is unexcelled in precision, terseness and epigrammatic sparkle. He is incomparably our most brilliant versifier, and his wit and fine writing consist in giving things that are known an agreeable turn.

    Amidst his poetical pursuits, Pope was never so entirely absorbed as not to cultivate a variety of friendships, some of which were with the female sex. Two ladies, Teresa and Martha Blount, daughters of a clergyman, attracted his particular attention, and they became his most intimate friends. To Teresa, the handsomer of the two, he seems to have been at first principally attached; but Martha afterwards became his intimate confidant and companion.

    Pope writes to Teresa from Bath

    September, 1714.

    MADAM,—I write to you for two reasons, one is because you commanded it, which will be always a reason to me in anything; the other, because I sit at home to take physic, and they tell me that I must do nothing that costs me great application or great pains, therefore I can neither say my prayers nor write verses. I am ordered to think but slightly of anything, and I am practising, if I can think so of you, which, if I can bring about, I shall be above regarding anything in nature for the future; I may then think of the world as a hazel nut, the sun as a spangle, and the king’s coronation as a puppet-show. When my physic makes me remember those I love, may it not be said to work kindly?

    . . . You are to understand, madam, that my violent passion for your fair self and your sister has been divided, and with the most wonderful regularity in the world. Even from my infancy I have been in love with one after the other of you week by week, and my journey to Bath fell out in the three hundred and seventy-sixth week of the reign of my sovereign lady Martha. At the present writing hereof it is the three hundred and eighty-ninth week of the reign of your most serene majesty, in whose service I was listed some weeks before I beheld her. This information will account for my writing to either of you hereafter, as she shall happen to be queen regent at that time.

    I could tell you a most delightful story of Dr. Parnelle, but want room to display it in all its shining circumstances. He had heard it was an excellent cure for love, to kiss the aunt of the person beloved, who is generally of years and experienced enough to damp the fiercest flame. He tried this course in his passion for you, and kissed Mrs. Engle-field at Mrs. Dancaster’s [Duncastle—ED.]. This recipe he hath left written in the style of a divine as follows:

    Whoso loveth Miss Blount shall kiss her aunt and be healed; for he kisseth her not as her husband, who kisseth and is enslaved for ever as one of the foolish ones; but as a passenger who passeth away and forgetteth the kiss of her mouth, even as the wind saluteth a flower in his passage, and knoweth not the odour thereof.

    (1) ALEXANDER POPE. (2) LAURENCE STERNE. (3) DEAN SWIFT.

    (Pope, it must be remembered, was always an invalid, was at no time of his life more depressed than about the years 1719 and 1720, which accounts for the despondent tone of some of his letters.)

    Pope to Teresa

    August 7th, 1716.

    MADAM,—I have so much esteem for you, and so much of the other thing, that, were I a handsome fellow, I should do you a vast deal of good; but, as it is, all that I am good for, is to write a civil letter, or to make a fine speech. The truth is, that considering how often and how openly I have declared love to you, I am astonished (and a little affronted) that you have not forbid my correspondence and directly said, See my face no more! . . . I am vain enough to conclude that (like most young fellows) a fine lady’s silence is consent, and so I write on.—

    But in order to be as innocent as possible in this epistle, I will tell you news. You have asked me news a thousand times, at the first word you spoke to me; which some would interpret as if you expected nothing from my lips; and truly it is not a sign two lovers are together, when they can be so impertinent as to inquire, what the world does. All I mean by this is that either you or I cannot be in love with the other; I leave you to guess which of the two is that stupid and insensible creature, so blind to the other’s excellences and charms. . . . 

    Pope to Martha Blount on her Birthday

    June 15th, 1724

    This is the day of wishes for you, and I hope you have long known that there is not one good one that I do not form in your behalf. Every year that passes I wish something more for my friends and something less for myself. Yet, were I to tell you what I wish for you in particular, it would be only to repeat in prose what I told you last year in rhyme (so sincere is my poetry).

    I can only add, that as I then wished you a friend, I now wish that friend were Mrs ——.

    (The verses were—To Mrs. Blount on her birthday):

    "O be thou blest with all that Heaven can send,

    Long health, long youth, long pleasures, and a friend."

    Pope to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

    (Shortly after her marriage, Lady Wortley Montagu went with her husband on an embassy to Constantinople, during which time Pope’s correspondence with her commenced. On her return she settled at Twickenham, which afforded Pope constant opportunities of seeing her. But ere long there was a misunderstanding ending in an open quarrel, in which they indulged in vituperations (as says Merydew) to say the least, intensely vulgar).

    August 18th, 1716.

    . . . I think I love you as well as King Herod could Herodias (though I never had so much as one dance with you) and would as freely give you my heart in a dish as he did another’s head.

    But since Jupiter will not have it so, I must be content to show my taste in life, as I do my taste in painting, by loving to have as little drapery as possible, not that I think every body naked altogether so fine a sight as yourself and a few more would be; but because it is good to use people to what they must be acquainted with; and there certainly will come some day of judgment to uncover every soul of us. We shall then see how the prudes of this world owed all their fine figures only to their being a little straiter-laced, and that they were naturally as arrant squabs as those that went more loose, nay as those that never girded their loins at all.

    . . . You may easily imagine how desirous I must be of corresponding with a person who had taught me long ago that it was as possible to esteem at first sight, as to love; and who have since ruined me for all the conversation of one sex, and almost all the friendship of the other.

    How often have I been quietly going to take possession of that tranquillity and indolence I had so long found in the country, when one evening of your conversation has spoiled me for a solitaire too. Books have lost their effect upon me, and I was convinced, since I saw you, that there is something more powerful than philosophy, and, since I heard you, that there is one alive wiser than all the sages. A plague of female wisdom! it makes a man ten times more uneasy than his own.

    JONATHAN SWIFT

    (1667–1745)

    IN virtue of so wide-reaching and philosophical a creation as the tale of Gulliver’s Travels, we may class Swift as the greatest satirist of modern times. There is no doubt but there was some radical disorder in his system; brain disease clouded his intellect in his old age, and his last years were death in life; right through his life he was a savagely irritable, sardonic, dark and violent man, impatient of the slightest contradiction or thwarting, and given to explosive and instantaneous rage.

    Three women figure in the unhappy story of Swift’s life. In his early years he had a passing courtship with a Miss Waring (Varina). But his cold temper and unconfined humour ever militated against his putting his head into the matrimonial noose. Could she, he asks, manage their joint affairs with an income of less than £300 a year?

    The real affection of his life was for Esther Johnson—the Stella of his verse. For her he wrote the Journal to Stella descriptive of his life in London, and there is a strong probability that he was latterly privately married to her. A third woman, Esther Vanhomrigh (Vanessa) loved Swift and received from him in return an ardent friendship easily mistaken for love. But when jealousy moved her to ask for an explanation of his relations with Stella, Swift was so enraged that he abruptly broke with her. Vanessa was so overcome that she died shortly afterwards

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1