Customer Reviews

Love Letters: An Anthology

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Antonia Fraser states in her introduction to his volume that it is a highly personal anthology, without any kind of scholarly pretension. She chooses those letters which have touched the heart. And I believe she is not far off when she says the greatest love letters in the English language are those of Keats. She organizes the letters into the following headings: Declarations, Pleas, Rejections, Nature of Love, Total Love, About Letters, Beginnings, Endings, In Brief.
There are brief biographical details of the letters' authors at the end of the volume.
Though she has selections of three letters from Kafka to Felice Bauer she does not have any of his letters to Milena which I find among the most tormentingly beautiful love- letters of all time.
This is a small excerpt of Juliette Drouet's letter to Victor Hugo.
"I have left you, my beloved.May the memory of my love follow and comfort you during our seperation. If you only knew how much I love you, how essential you are to my life you would not dare to stay away for an instant, you would always remain by my side, your heart pressed close to my heart, your soul to my soul."

Hawthorne said 'Unless the heart is touched we do not begin to be' and some of these letters certainly touch the heart.