Love Letters

A love letter is an expression of love in written form. However delivered, the letter may be anything from a short and simple message of love to a lengthy explanation and description of feelings.

History

One of the oldest references to a love letter dates to Indian mythology of more than 5000 years ago. 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.

Examples 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". 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. How on earth can anyone want to marry her off to some humdrum clod?"

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". p. 133 and p. 127
Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and writer of ''Meditations'', exchanged love letters with his tutor, Marcus Cornelius Fronto.

The Middle Ages saw the formal development of the Ars dictaminis, including the art of the love letter from opening to close. 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 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'".

The love letter continued to be taught as a skill at the start of the eighteenth century, as in Richard Steele's ''Spectator''. 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'".

20th century

The love letter continued to flourish in the first half of the twentieth-century–F Scott Fitzgerald gives us a 1920s Flapper "absorbed in composing one of those non-committal, marvelously elusive letters that only a young girl can write."

Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West's flirtatious love letters were one aspect of their complicated relationship. 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.

Before the development of widespread means of telecommunications, letters were one of the few ways for a distant couple to remain in contact, particularly in wartime. The strains on either end of such a relationship could intensify emotions and lead to letters going beyond simple communication to expressions of love, longing and desires. It is claimed that the very act of writing can trigger feelings of love in the writer. Secrecy, delays in transit, and the exigencies of maneuvers could further complicate the communication between two parties, whatever their degree of involvement. So precious could love letters be that even already read ones would even be brought into battle and read again for solace during a break in the action. Others would defer, compartmentalizing their feelings and leaving a letter folded away where it would cause no pain.

During World War II, anti-aircraft gunner Gilbert Bradley and infantryman Gordon Bowsher exchanged intimate love letters, which are currently owned by the Oswestry Town Museum. Because of the criminalization of homosexuality in England during the 1940s, large collections of queer love letters from that period are rare. "The Letter Men," a short film written and directed by Andrew Vallentine, recreates Bradley and Bowsher's love story through their letters.

In the second half of the century, with the coming of a more permissive society - and the immediacy afforded by the technology of the Information Age, the nuanced art of the love letter became old-fashioned, even anachronistic. Despite the availability of new forms of communication, many couples still exchanged love letters. In 1953, Rachel Carson (naturalist and writer of ''Silent Spring'') met Dorothy Freeman and two exchanged about 900 letters over 12 years. While they destroyed some of their letters to protect themselves, Freeman's granddaughter edited the surviving ones, which were published in 1995.

Other love letter-writers of the 20th century include anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, painters Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, poets Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, and first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and journalist Lorena Hickok.

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