Nigel Nicolson, Sackville-West's son, called Woolf's Orlando "the longest and most charming love-letter in literature" because of the inspiration Woolf took from her friend and lover, Sackville-West. Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West's flirtatious love letters were one aspect of their complicated relationship. The love letter continued to flourish in the first half of the 20th century – F Scott Fitzgerald writes a 1920s Flapper "absorbed in composing one of those non-committal, marvelously elusive letters that only a young girl can write." Reading and writing love letters was seen as an extremely intimate experience, akin to being in the presence of their loved one. Etiquette manuals, magazines, and book-length guides provided advice and sample letters while at the same time insisting that the writer should write naturally and sincerely. ![]() Thus, exchanging love letters was a widespread courtship activity, particularly among the upper- and middle-class. In Victorian America, it was expected that endearments and affection should be kept strictly private. Perhaps in reaction, the artificiality of the concept came to be distrusted by the Romantics: "'A love-letter? My letter – a love-letter? It came straight from my heart'". The love letter continued to be taught as a skill at the start of the 18th century, as in Richard Steele's Spectator. The substance similarly "ranges from doubtful equivoque to exquisite and fantastic dreaming", rising to appeals for "the assurance 'that you care for me the way I care for you'". For salutations, "the scale in love letters is nicely graded from 'To the noble and discreet lady P., adorned with every elegance, greeting' to the lyrical fervors of 'Half of my soul and light of my eyes greeting, and that delight which is beyond all word and deed to express'". The Middle Ages saw the formal development of the Ars dictaminis, including the art of the love letter from opening to close. Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and writer of Meditations, exchanged love letters with his tutor, Marcus Cornelius Fronto. In Ancient Rome, "the tricky construction and reception of the love letter" formed the center of Ovid's Ars Amatoria or Art of Love: "The love letter is situated at the core of Ovidian erotics". How on earth can anyone want to marry her off to some humdrum clod?" ![]() A fine expression of literary skill can be found in Imperial China: when a heroine, faced with an arranged marriage, wrote to her childhood sweetheart, he exclaimed, "What choice talent speaks in her well-chosen words everything breathes the style of a Li T'ai Po. Įxamples from Ancient Egypt range from the most formal, and possibly practical – "The royal widow Ankhesenamun wrote a letter to the king of the Hittites, Egypt's old enemy, begging him to send one of his sons to Egypt to marry her" – to the down-to-earth: Let me "bathe in thy presence, that I may let thee see my beauty in my tunic of finest linen, when it is wet". Mentioned in the Bhagavatha Purana, book 10, chapter 52, it is addressed by princess Rukmini to King Krishna and carried to him by her Brahmin messenger Sunanda. One of the oldest references to a love letter dates to Indian mythology of more than 5,000 years ago. However delivered, the letter may be anything from a short and simple message of love to a lengthy explanation and description of feelings. Opening a love letter by Amedeo SimonettiĪ love letter is an expression of love in written form.
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