Eight Hundred Years of Women's Letters

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Few books offer such an historical panorama of women's issues in such a small space. A remarkable voyage through time, cultures, and ways of being female.

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Olga Kenyon has unearthed eight centuries of lost voices, easily proving her assertion that women's letters are indeed "a great art form." Though readers will have heard of many of these correspondents--from Heloise (to Abelard, naturally) to Restoration playwright-spy Aphra Behn to Madame de Sévigné--most of us would be hard put to volunteer any solid information. Kenyon organizes these letters by theme, including friendship, childhood and education, war work, and political skills, and the juxtapositions are enlightening. "Housekeeping and Daily Life" features the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, who writes of being forced to leave her two-year-old tied to a chair while she searches Moscow for provisions; Queen Elizabeth I, who bemoans the bad shape Buckingham Palace is in; and Hannah Cullwick, a servant who anatomizes England's sharp class divisions, circa 1864. Cullwick writes of toiling in the kitchen while the upper classes lord it upstairs: "But it's always so with ladies and servants and of course there is a difference cause their bringing up is so different--servants may feel it sharply and do sometimes i believe, but it's best not to be delicate, nor mind what work we do so as it's honest." There is an evident high seriousness to Kenyon's enterprise--you won't find, for example, any of Nancy Mitford's sparkling missives. On the other hand, she does include a teasing letter from the great Victorian traveler Mary Kingsley, which begins: "My cannibal friends never eat human heads unless for religious purposes."


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In this engrossing anthology, the first truly comprehensive study of women's letters, Olga Kenyon takes us from the twelfth century to the present day and explores the tradition of female letter-writing that has existed for over eight centuries. Here is Heloise writing to Abelard's 'superior wisdom' of 'how much I have lost in you' from twelfth-century Paris; Margaret Paston, the efficient manager of her husband's estate, vividly describing her troubles in affectionate letters to her husband while he was practising law in London during the Wars of the Roses; Elizabeth I firmly but tactfully refusing Erik of Sweden's offer of marriage as she 'highly commends this single life'; Queen Victoria complaining to Sir Robert Peel about the 'disgrace' in the neglect of Buckingham Palace; Jane Austen writing to her sister Cassandra, and Fanny Burney on Dr Johnson; Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf exchanging intimate thoughts on their lives and writing; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu describing how, abandoned by her lover, she rebuilds her life and her garden in Italy 'enjoying every amusement that solitude can afford'; and many more lesser known women whose writing reveals much of their day to day lives and the sometimes restricted world they inhabited. The collection has a wide geographical range: Mary Kingsley writes of her experiences travelling in the Congo, and the voices of women in America, France and Spain, such as George Sand and La Pasionaria, can also be heard. The letters are divided into chapters thematically: How Women View their Roles, Friendship, Childhood and Education, Love and Sexual Passion, Marriage and Childbirth, Housekeeping and Daily Life, Work, War and Alleviating Suffering, Travellers and Travelling, Illness and Ageing, Political Skills. An appendix covers the epistolary novel, and a full bibliography is also included. Both entertaining and informative, the letters reveal the nature of women's lives throughout the centuries...


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