Revealing to Conceal: Love-letters and Privacy in Republican China
Bonnie S. McDougall＊ Abstract
Letters, especially love-letters, reveal private thoughts and emo- tions to a readership that may be intentionally finite or unintentionally infinite. The borderline between genuine and imagined letters and be- tween private and open letters has always been fuzzy, as shown through- out the history of European and Chinese letters. Imagined love-letters have appeared in Chinese fiction and drama since the Tang dynasty as devices to elaborate the plot, to reveal character and to provide variety in narration and dialogue. In the early 20th century they also served to evoke authenticity and to focus on the subjective and intimate. With few exceptions, however, the publication of apparently authentic love-let- ters has been relatively rare in China.
Epistolary fiction in Republican China owes some inspiration to European models such as Goethe’s Das Leiden die jungen Werthers but has unique characteristics: written mainly by young women for a young female audience, short stories with an epistolary framework or consist-
Keywords: Privacy, Letter-writing, Love letters, Epistolary fiction, Re- publican Chinese literature.
＊ Bonnie S. McDougall is Professor of Chinese, The University of Edinburgh.
ing mainly of inserted letters were seen by writers and readers as a semi- autobiographical genre for the exploration of themes such as friendship with other young women, intimate reflections on life and its travails, determination to choose one’s own husband, and disillusionment follow- ing marriage based on free choice. The birthplace for epistolary fiction was Peking Women’s Normal College, where the student group in the early 1920s included Huang Luyin, Shi Pingmei, Feng Yuanjun and Xu Guangping, and the male staff included Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren and Xu Zuzheng: all published epistolary fiction and/or collections of their let- ters in the 1920s and early 1930s.
Early examples of epistolary fiction introduced a sudden fashion around the mid 1920s for literary couples to publish their own love-letters.
One of the most notable examples is the exchange between Huang Luyin and Li Weijian. The most enduring collection of published love-letters, however, is Liang di shu, the correspondence between Lu Xun and Xu Guangping, the only one of the Republican collections still in print. Just as suddenly as the fashion arose, it had disappeared by the mid 1930s, when the particular conjunction of sexual and literary emancipation that led to the practice had passed. Although love-letters continued to be published, they tended to appear in collections or anthologies without their dialogic partners. Letters by famous literary couples of the 1920s and 1930s not published by their authors include those between Yu Dafu and Wang Yingxia, Xu Zhimo and Lu Xiaoman, Shen Congwen and Zhang Zhaohe, and Xiao Hong and Xiao Jun.
The difference in attitudes towards privacy shown by writers who did or did not publish their love-letters shows how idiosyncratic the sense of privacy was, with no obvious pattern in regard to age, gender or social and professional ties. At the same time, the way in which their letters were published, whether as heavily edited but nevertheless genuine let- ters or as thinly-disguised epistolary fiction, shows an awareness that
some degree of privacy may need to be revealed in order that a deeper level can be concealed.
Letters are about as universal a phenomenon in any literate society as can be found apart from basic human needs. They cross temporal, geographical, ethnic and cultural borders; their ubiquity transcends dif- ferences in age, gender, education and social class; their versatility em- braces infinite variation. As objects they are familiar, everyday things, although they have immense significance to their writers and readers;
the acts of writing and reading letters may be innocent or devious, spon- taneous or studied. Letters are generally considered to be private, but after their authors’ death, and sometimes even within the authors’
lifetimes, they attract third-party readers. This paper will begin with an examination of the relationship between letters and privacy in European and Chinese history, as an in troduction to love-letters in Republican China.＊＊
Part I: Letters and privacy
The connection between personal letters and privacy is repeatedly confirmed in the history of letters. Their writers and readers have noted their wish for privacy: in writing and in reading letters; in carrying them
＊＊The origins of this research was a study of the correspondence between Lu Xun and Xu Guangping, published as “Functions and Values of Privacy in the Correspondence between Lu Xun and Xu Guangping, 1925-1929,” in Chinese Concepts of Privacy, edited by Bonnie S. McDougall and Anders Hansson (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 147-168, and Love-letters and Privacy in Modern China: The Intimate Lives of Lu Xun and Xu Guangping (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Much of the research for the present article was conducted at the Centre for Chinese Studies at the National Central Library in Taipei in 1999 and 2001, and the author is most grateful to the CCS staff for their generous assistance and hospitality.
as a talisman; in preserving them in a locked safe, in an underwear drawer, or concealed between the pages of a book. Lovers who are constrained in public by natural modesty or external pressures find refuge in the acts of reading and writing letters. Through letters, lovers can conduct their courtship (and married partners affirm their affection) at times and places where they are free from the gaze of others and at leisure.
Fame and especially death mean an end to privacy: a decent inter- val after death, such as the expiration of the writer’s copyright, allows our sense of eavesdropping to be overcome by Time’s “strange power of resanctifying desecration and making private property public.” 1 The publication of authentic letters has a long history, the production of imag- ined letters even longer.
The right of privacy in correspondence is enshrined in the legal sys- tems of many countries. 2 At least three parties have rights in their circulation: the writer, the recipient, and the family of the writer, not to mention publishers, historians and other scholars, and general readers.
Letters that have been delivered become the property of the recipient or transferee, but copyright remains with the writer, usually including a short period after his/her death, or with the deceased writer’s spouse.
The case which established this principle in English common law in 1741 upheld Alexander Pope’s right to prevent publication of private letters that he had written to Jonathan Swift and which had come into the possession of a bookseller. 3 The doctrine that it is morally reprehensible
1 George Saintsbury, A Letter Book: Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing (London: Bell, 1922), pp. 90-91.
2 Samuel H. Hofstadter and George Horowitz, The Right of Privacy (New York: Central Book Company, 1964), pp. 155-60.
3 Hofstadter and Horowitz, The Right of Privacy, p. 155. Ruth Perry claims that Pope colluded in the publication of his letters; see Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel (New York: AMS Press, 1980), p. 71.
to publish a private letter is even more ancient: Cicero famously de- nounced Mark Antony for having read aloud in the Senate the letter of a friend, accusing him of conduct that breaks the bonds of society. 4 At the same time, the pleasure that unintended readers find in intruding into others’ lives is undeniable. Another advantage of reading other people’s letters, according to Lord Byron, is that there is no need to answer them. 5 A sense of transgression may heighten the pleasure: Byron showed Lady Melbourne Augusta Leigh’s love-letters to him; Augusta Leigh showed Byron’s wife his letters to her. 6
European letters in print
The process by which private letters passed into public circulation is not always clear, especially in the case of older letters. A unique set of familiar letters are those by Marcus Tullius Cicero (106─43 BC), writ- ten mostly in the last twenty years of his life. His letters are primarily on public events but often touch on family matters and disclose his moods to his intimate friends. The unreliability of letter-bearers makes him reluctant to refer to politically sensitive matters in his letters, but the letters to Atticus, his brother-in-law, are private enough for Cicero to ask him not to let others read them. 7 He advises his friends to throw them away after reading, but his letters to Atticus nevertheless were preserved by the recipient, who allowed others to see them. 8 Another
4 Hofstadter and Horowitz, The Right of Privacy, p. 155.
5 Antonia Fraser, comp., Love Letters: An Anthology (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1976), p. xxi.
6 Michael and Melissa Bakewell, Augusta Leigh: Byron’s Half-sister (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000), p. 323.
7 Marcus Tullius Cicero, Selected Letters, translated with an Introduction by D. R.
Shackleton Bailey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), pp. 37, 45, 46, 69 and 95.
8 Letters to Atticus, edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 4 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
collection of letters to (and from) diverse members of his family, friends and colleagues was preserved and edited by Cicero’s secretary. 9 Both collections were published in the middle of the first century AD, but we know nothing of the circumstances in which they were made available to a wider audience; some thought that this was Cicero’s intention all along. 10 The letters by Pliny the Younger (61 ─ 113) addressed to his wife Calpurnia, thought to have been influenced by Cicero, were always intended for public circulation. 11 Cicero’s posthumous readers include de Sévigné; his Letters also ranked high in Oscar Wilde's list of recom- mended reading. 12 Since Cicero’s time, it must be assumed that all professional writers and most public figures will consider the possibility that the letters they write today will be read by unknown others in the future. It is unlikely that the boundaries between public and private letters were ever rigid, and it is already evident at this time that they were, by any measure, flexible.
Accidental discovery In ancient Greek and Rome, literacy was not necessarily a marker of political power, and letter tablets were mostly in the hand of a professional scribe. Nevertheless, “The Roman, at any rate the upper-class Roman, was a letter writer,” 13 although few of his
9 The companion volume is Letters to His Friends, edited and translated by W. Glynn Williams, 3 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927). Each collection consists of 426 letters.
10 Saintsbury, A Letter Book, p. 11.
11 See extracts in Robin Hamilton and Nicolas Soames, eds., Intimate Letters (London:
Marginalia Press, 1994), pp. 3-4; and Mary R. Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant, eds., Women’s Life in Greece and Rome a sourcebook in translation, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1992), p. 184.
12 Mme de Sévigné, Selected Letters, translated with an introduction by Leonard Tancock (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 254; Oscar Wilde, Selected Letters, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 65.
13 From the Introduction to Selected Letters by Cicero, p. 20.
personal letters remain (Cicero was an exception). Only a small number of surviving texts from the ancient world were written by women, but they include both personal and formal letters. 14 The earliest example of Latin handwriting by a woman is on a tablet dated 170 AD found at the archaeological site at Vindolanda in England, which bears the text of a letter from Claudia Severa, the wife of an officer living in a house near the Roman camp at Hadrian’s Wall, to her friend Sulpicia Lepidina, inviting her to her birthday party. Severa adds greetings to Lepidina’s husband and from her own husband and son. The main text is appar- ently dictated to a scribe, but the final salutation is thought to be in Severa’s own hand. 15 The accidental discovery of Severa’s tablet is a reminder that informal and personal letters and notes are routinely discarded by their writers and recipients. Failure to preserve texts of this kind does not spell an absence of the private life and feelings described in them. Ovid (43─18BC) advises lovers how to pay court in letters on waxed tablets; 16 we can suppose that many were written although only three or four remain from Roman times. 17
One of the earliest and most famous posthumously published love- letter collections is the correspondence between Abelard (1079 ─ 1142) and Heloise (1101 ─ 1164), written in Latin prose. Peter Abelard was employed as Heloise’s tutor. He seduced her and then married her after she had borne his child. Punished with castration by her guardian, Abelard then insisted to Heloise that she become a nun. After a silence of
14 Lefkowitz and Fant, eds, Women’s Life in Greece and Rome , p. xxiii.
15 Olga Kenyon, 800 Years of Women’s Letters, (Stroud: Allan Sutton, 1992), pp. 32-33;
Lefkowitz and Fant, Women’s Life in Greece and Rome, p. 205. I am indebted to Professor John Crook of St. John’s College, Cambridge, for this information.
16 Ovid, “The Art of Love,” in The Love Poems, translated by A. D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 98-100.
17 Phillipe Ariès and Georges Duby, eds, A History of Private Life, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press), 1987, p. 101.
some ten years, Heloise wrote a series of letters to him when she was in her mid-twenties and he was in his mid-forties, confessing that her passion for him had not abated. His replies recommend to her the nobil- ity of spiritual love and sacrifice. 18 The correspondence was preserved by the lovers by transcription from wax tablets to parchment, but the letters were then neglected for almost five centuries. They were first circulated in 1616, paraphrased and translated into French by various hands throughout the 17th century, and published in definitive editions in the early 18th century. The discovery in 1974 of earlier correspon- dence between Abelard and Heloise, from when they first became lovers, has confirmed the authenticity of the later correspondence. 19
A groundbreaking feature of this collection is that letters by both parties were included; previous collections had been one-sided for the sake of literary unity. For the general reader, each kind has its own attraction. On the one hand, “there is, first of all, the compelling reality of a single persona behind a series of letters.” 20 On the other hand,
“Another kind of unity is found in some of the extended exchanges in volumes of miscellaneous letters, in which the reader watches, and perhaps vicariously enjoys, the relationship between the two correspondents.” 21 Although they represent most readers’experience of published letters, collections and anthologies of letters which for practi- cal reasons are one-sided give a misleading impression of the actual exchange. (Three-sided collections are rare, and collections by four par-
18 The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, translated and edited by Betty Radice (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1974). See also Linda S. Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 18-19, 63-89.
19 See Constant J. Mews, The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of dialogue in twelfth-century France (London: Macmillan, 1999).
20 Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel, p. 80.
21 Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel, p. 81.
ties or more appear to be non-existent.)
Publication by authors Publication of letters by the authors them- selves during their own lifetimes is comparatively rare, and that of love- letters even rarer. 22 In general, the privacy of letters is felt most keenly by the original writer and recipient, and when one or both of the original couple are involved in publication, editorial intervention appears in the form of deletions, recensions and even additions. One of the first ex- amples of apparently authentic love-letters published by the author her- self is Veronica Franco’s Lettere familiari a diversi (1580), written in Italian verse in Venice at a time when the familiar letter was a recognised genre in Renaissance Europe. 23 We have no way of knowing whether or not these letters were intended or revised for publication, but it is rea- sonable to assume that there might be elements of both intention and revision.
The boundaries between authentic letters written for a single re- cipient or limited circulation and letters written for general publication were further undermined in 17th century Europe by Epistolae Hoelianae or Familiar Letters (1657) by James Howell (1593─1666), said to be the first collection of unofficial letters written for publication. 24 The mul- tiple uses of 18th century letters is well illustrated by the correspon- dence between Leopold and Wolfgang Mozart: the father’s sermonising letters were written with full awareness of their commercial value, while the son’s deceptive replies and destruction of his father’s letters were
22 Although the account below deals chiefly with love-letters, their comparatively rare appearances are supplemented with examples of letters in general, since there are no significant features of letters in general that are not also present in love-letters, and since almost all characteristics of love-letters are also true of letters in general.
23 Margaret F. Rosenthal, “A Courtesan’s Voice: Epistolary Self-Portraiture in Veronica Franco’s Terza Rime,” in Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, ed., Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989), pp. 3-24.
24 Saintsbury, A Letter Book, p. 135.
part of his strategy for intellectual and artistic independence. 25 In the 19th century, George Sand edited and published letters from her lover, Alfred de Musset, to Henry James’s disapproval. 26
Sometimes publication was contested. One of Oscar Wilde’s early love-letters to Alfred Douglas, read out in court to public scandal, was later described by its author as a literary conceit: “The letter is like a passage from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, transposed to a minor key...
It was, let me say frankly, the sort of letter I would, in a happy if wilful moment, have written to any graceful young man of either University who had sent me a poem of his own making, certain that he would have sufficient wit or culture to interpret rightly its fantastic phrases.” 27 When he heard that Douglas was planning to publish his letters from prison, Wilde wrote his letter of condemnation and confession for imme- diate publication in part as “De Profundis.” 28 (Wilde, of course, was aware that he had copyright over his letters and forbade their publica- tion by Douglas.29 The publication of Wilde’s correspondence was sanc- tioned by his grandson.)
A one-sided collection that was meant to be published, André Gide’s two thousand letters to his wife Madeleine, written over thirty years, were burnt by her during his visit to Cambridge with a young male lover:
25 See David Schroeder, Mozart in Revolt: Strategies of Resistance, Mischief and Deception (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), especially the Introduction, pp. 1-18, and Chapter 3, pp. 59-85.
26 Fraser, Love Letters, p. 9.
27 Wilde, Selected Letters, pp. 169-170. The love-letters read out in court are on pp. 107, 111.
28 The full version of the letter to Douglas published in part as “De Profundis” is in Wilde, Selected Letters, pp. 152-240; for Wilde’s comments on the early letters, see p. 169; for his protest at the publication of the prison letters, see pp. 182-84. Douglas claimed to have destroyed 150 letters from Wilde, but enough survive to trace the alternation between love and hatred in Wilde’s emotions towards Douglas.
29 Wilde, Selected Letters, p. 187.
“An incomplete, inexact, caricatured, grimacing image is now all that will endure of me,” he lamented. “My authentic reflection has been wiped out, for ever... all that was purest, noblest in my life, all that could best have survived, and shone, and spread warmth and beauty, all is destroyed.
And no effort of mine will ever be able to replace it.” 30
Family as heirs The authors’ surviving family members and descendants are usually the heirs to saved love-letters and it is their choice whether or not to publish. Especially in the case of famous men and women, families are generally less inclined to preserve the privacy of the authors or recipients. A writer who dies young may be commemo- rated by the early publication of his or her letters, either one or two- sided, with the consent of the bereaved. Although in some cases there may have been a tacit understanding that the letters might be published posthumously, they are not edited for publication by the authors themselves. Unless there is a clear statement to the contrary, on the other hand, it is reasonable to assume that the family has undertaken some editing.
Some descendants press ahead despite the wishes of the original author. John Donne (1572─1631) circulated his private correspondence among friends but was on guard against unauthorised readers; his son, who did not share his qualms, made somewhat garbled versions avail- able to all. 31 Some families, or some members of the family, object to publication. The letters written by Madame de Sévigné (1626─96), first published a year after her death and reissued many times, were heavily edited by the author’s granddaughter, but there was disagreement within the family on what was and what was not appropriate for public circulation;
30 Alan Sheridan, André Gide: A Life in the Present (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 314-15.
31 Cecile M. Jagodzinski, Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), pp. 86-92.
in the end, first some and eventually all of the original manuscripts were destroyed. 32
Lady Mary Wortley Montague’s Turkish Letters (1763) is an ex- ample of the uncertain line between public and private. It was first com- posed as individual letters and journal entries for circulation among friends, and was afterwards revised by her for publication. Although her family forbade publication during her lifetime, it was published a year after her death. 33 Her private letters show her great interest in letter- writing as a genre. In a letter to her sister, she writes, “The last pleasure that fell in my way was Madame Sévigné’s letters [published two years earlier]; very pretty they are, but I assert, without the least vanity, that mine will be full as entertaining forty years hence. I advise you, therefore, to put none of them to the use of waste paper.” 34 To her daughter, she is more frank: “How many readers and admirers has Madame de Sévigné, who only gives us, in a lively manner and fashionable phrases, mean sentiments, vulgar prejudices, and endless repetition? Sometimes the tittle-tattle of a fine lady, sometimes that of an old nurse, always tittle- tattle; yet so well gilt over by airy expressions, and a flowing style, she will also please the same people to whom Lord Bolingbroke will shine as a first-rate author. She is so far to be excused, as her letters were not intended for the press; while he...” 35
The hybrid form of letters plus travel diary was becoming common in the 18th century, but Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a
32 Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, “Authority, Authenticity, and the Publication of Letters by Women,” in Goldsmith, ed., Writing the Female Voice, pp. 51-55.
33 Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montague (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 199-201, 241-42, 516, 612, 625-27; see also review by Margaret Anne Doody, Times Literary Supplement, 14 May 1999, p. 25.
34 Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters (London: David Campbell Publishers,1992); Letter to the Countess of Mar [June 1726], p. 241.
35 Montagu, Letters; Letter to the Countess of Bute, July 20 [1754], pp. 443-44.
Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) had special interest: as many of her readers may have guessed, the letters were first addressed to Gilbert Imlay, the lover who had left her and the child he fathered. Wollstonecraft set out on her journey with the intention of writing a travel book, combining selected passages from her letters to him with notes on the scenery and customs. The complete letters, re- turned at her request, were published after her death by her husband, William Godwin. 36
The correspondence between Elizabeth Barrett (1806 ─ 1861) and Robert Browning (1812─1889) consists of over five hundred letters writ- ten during the two years of their courtship. Barrett had recently pub- lished a successful book of poems; Browning was also a well-known poet, and after their elopement and marriage they formed a famous literary partnership. Their son authorised the publication of their love-letters, 37 but the extent to which the letters are edited is not clear.
Lydia Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes were an improbable but happy couple: he was an economist, senior government advisor and Cam- bridge academic; she was a young ballet dancer who came to England with Diaghilev in 1918. A selection of their playful, touching letters, written during their courtship from December 1918 to June 1925 and edited for publication by their son, 38 counters the malicious gossip about
36 Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, edited by Carol H. Poston (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976); Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000), pp. 231-369; Mary A. Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 96-132.
37 First edited by Robert Wiedemann Barrett Browning as The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1897 and then as The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1899. See Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett: The Courtship Corre- spondence 1845-1846, A Selection, edited by Daniel Karlin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
38 The Letters of Lydia Lopokova and John Maynard Keynes, edited by Polly Hill and
them that had circulated in Bloomsbury (Virginia Woolf had called their affair “a fatal, and irreparable mistake.”) 39
Simone de Beauvoir’s Beloved Chicago Man: Letters to Nelson Algren 1947-64 was published two years after her death by the author’s daughter.
de Beauvoir (1908─1986) and Algren (1909 ─ 1981) began their affair in 1947 and continued it for many years despite meeting rarely; the pub- lication of her book, Force of Circumstance, in the U. S. in 1965 led to a final break between them. According to her daughter’s Preface, de Beauvoir’s letters to Algren were sold after his death; she agreed to their publication but the project was not achieved during her lifetime. Her daughter retains possession of Algren’s letters to de Beauvoir but notes without explanation that the publication of both sides of the correspon- dence was not possible. 40
Friends and admirers Publication by friends and admirers is com- mon when one or both writers are celebrities or professional writers, but editorial interventions are also still common, whether to preserve pri- vacy or moral reputations (which, in some cases, amount to the same thing). In 1832, Maria Edgeworth complained to Walter Scott’s biogra- pher John Gibson Lockhart about the current “general rage” for publish- ing private correspondence but was persuaded eventually to allow her letters to Scott to appear in the biography; an American critic also con- demned the use of private letters and journals in Lockhart’s biography.
Many of the correspondents who contributed their letters sent edited transcripts to Lockhart rather than the originals, and Lockhart himself was conscious when he sent letters to Scott that these might in time be
Richard Keynes (London: Andre Deutsch, 1989).
39 Virginia Woolf, A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. III: 1923- 1928, edited by Nigel Nicolson (London: The Hogarth Press, 1977), p. 33.
40 Simone de Beauvoir, Beloved Chicago Man: Letters to Nelson Algren 1947-64, compiled and with a Preface by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir (London: Victor Gollancz, 1988).
published. 41
The publication of the letters between John Keats and Fanny Brawne in 1878 by Harry Buxton Forman caused a great scandal, especially when it became known that Buxton Forman had sold the originals. Oscar Wilde wrote a poem on the sale, which he recommended to W. B. Yeats for inclusion in A Book of Irish Verse, and which he quoted to Douglas as another instance where a poet’s privacy, like his, had been betrayed. 42 (The originals of these letters have been preserved, and it appears that the printed versions are meticulously authentic.) 43
The letters from Franz Kafka (1883 ─ 1924) to Milená Jezenská (1896─1944) were first published in 1952; her letters to him have been lost. The correspondence took place between April and November, 1920, during which period they met only twice. Their first contact came after Jezenská translated one of Kafka’s short stories, although Kafka was still virtually unknown. The affair was kept secret since Jezenská was then married. Kafka’s letters were entrusted by her to a friend of both parties, Willy Hass, whose heavily edited version was published after her death in a concentration camp. 44
Academic publication Preservation of the author or recipient’s privacy is generally a low priority to modern scholars and anthologists, especially when the lapse of time between writing and publication is a matter of centuries rather than decades: James I writing to George
41 Francis R. Hart, Lockhart as Romantic Biographer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971), pp. 167-68, 177-78, 179-80.
42 Wilde, Selected Letters, p. 183.
43 See Letters of John Keats, edited by Robert Gittings (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. xi-xii, xxi-xxii.
44 A revised edition with all but four omissions restored was published in 1986. For the English translation see Franz Kakfa, Letters to Milena, translated with an Introduction by Philip Boehm (New York: Schocker Books, 1990).
Villiers in 1622 enjoined him to “let no creature see this letter,” but it has now become famous. 45 In contrast to family and friends, scholars generally disregard the writer’s express wishes. Charles Dickens, whose love-life was more complicated than he wished his readers to know, speci- fied in his will that he wanted to be remembered by posterity only by the writings he himself had published; he condemned the “improper use made of confidential letters, in the addressing of them to a public audi- ence that has no business with them,” and destroyed all letters sent to him “as the only safe way of keeping them out of print.” Although his correspondents did not always oblige, Dickens felt safe enough to de- scribe a rail accident in June 1865 in which he was involved in nineteen different letters using the identical set of words, suppressing the infor- mation that it took place on a journey back from France with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, and her mother. 46 He went to elaborate lengths to protect his correspondence with Ternan ever being discovered, and the originals have never been found; it took infra-red photography even to reveal that they ever were written. 47
Authentic Chinese letters
The oldest piece of writing that has been classified as shu 書[letters]
dates from the Spring and Autumn period, and by Han times it was firmly established as a literary genre. 48 The earliest personal letters in
45 Fraser, Love Letters, p. 82; Hamilton and Soames, Intimate Letters, pp. 35-36.
46 In some of these letters, the incident was transcribed by Georgina Hogarth, Dickens only adding the salutation, ending and signature; see Graham Storey, ed., The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 11, 1865-1867 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), pp. ix-x; see also the review of this volume by Alethea Hayter, TLS, 4 February 2000, p. 36.
47 Storey, op. cit., p. xi.
48 See Eva Yuen-wah Chung, “A Study of the ‘Shu’ (Letters) of the Han Dynasty (206 B. C.- A. D. 200)”, Ph. D dissertation, University of Washington, 1982; available through University Microfilms International; pp. 56, 112
Chinese are those found in an archaeological site dating from 217 BC;
they were written on two wooden strips, from two soldiers writing home to their families asking for clothes and money. 49 Private letters have also been found in Han tombs, the best preserved on silk. 50 The most famous early personal letter is “Bao Ren Shaoqing Shu報任少卿書” [Reply to Ren An] by the historian Sima Qian 司馬遷 (145 ─ 90 BC), on the events leading up to his castration. 51 The history of its preservation is not clear, but the text first appears in the biography of Sima Qian in the Han shu 漢書[History of the Han dynasty] by Ban Gu 班固(32─92) and Ban Zhao 班昭. 52 3rd century letter-writers include Cao Pi 曹丕(187 ─ 226) and Cao Zhi 曹植 (192 ─ 232). Authentic letters by literary schol- ars and poets such as Han Yu韓愈 (768─824) and Su Shi蘇軾 (1036─
1101), written in classical Chinese, were routinely included in their post- humous collections, although personal letters, which may have been writ- ten in a more colloquial language, were not. 53
Well-known writers of the Ming and Qing dynasties, such as Feng Menglong 馮夢龍(1574─1646), Li Yu 李漁(1611─80?) and Yuan Mei 袁 枚(1716 ─ 1798) were among noted letter-writers and anthologists. 54
49 Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A Manual (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1998), p. 759.
50 Wilkinson, pp. 116, 763.
51 For an analysis of early Chinese letters and privacy, see David Pattinson, “Privacy and Letter writing in Han and Six Dynasties China,” in McDougall and Hansson, eds., Chinese Concepts of Privacy, pp. 97-118.
52 Translated into English in Anthology of Chinese Literature, compiled and edited by Cyril Birch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 120-27, and in An Anthology of Chinese Literature, edited and translated by Stephen Owen (New York: Norton, 1996), pp. 136- 42. This letter is also contained in Wen xuan文選 (see below).
53 Note by Stephen Owen, Renditions, special issue on letters, p. 51. Examples of letters by Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan 柳宗元 are also included in Wang Li王力, Gudai Hanyu古代漢 語 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju,1963).
54 Patrick Hanan, The Invention of Li Yu (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 24-25.
Prominent Qing letter-writers could expect posthumous publication as a matter of course, and publication during one’s lifetime was also commonplace. Letters by famous men were published as models: the family letters written by Zeng Guofan 曾國藩 (1811 ─ 1872) to his son Jize 紀澤 after his 17th birthday, first published as part of Zeng’s collected writings in 1879, became separately available in popular edi- tions up until the present; short extracts from them along with other prose by Zeng Guofan were compiled by Liang Qichao 梁啟超 in 1927, and reprinted as recently as 1985. 55 The posthumously published collection of letters to his natural son by Lord Chesterfield (1694─1773) is a close but worldlier cousin. 56
Women in Imperial China also exchanged letters with lovers, rela- tives and friends, although comparatively little of their correspondence was preserved. 57 One Song writer expressed pleasure that his wife was literate enough to write to him; a son was overjoyed at a letter from his mother. 58 Matchmaking was conducted through the exchange of letters of proposal and acceptance. 59 The “cult of qing 情 ” [feeling, emotion, love] in the late Ming provided a foothold in the literary world for women. 60
55 Liu, Kwang-Ching, “Education for Its Own Sake: Notes on Tseng Kuo-fan’s Family Letters,” in Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 1600-1900, edited by Benjamin A. Elman and Alexander Woodside (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp.
76-108.
56 See Saintsbury, A Letter Book, pp. 28-31; M. Lincoln Schuster, ed., A Treasury of the World’s Great Letters (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1940), pp. 125-27.
57 See Ellen Widmer, “The Epistolary World of Female Talent in Seventeenth Century China,” Late Imperial China, vol. 10 no. 2 (1989), pp. 1-43; and Yu-Yin Cheng, “Letters by Women of the Ming-Qing Period,” in Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on Gender in Chinese History, edited by Susan Mann and Yu-Yin Cheng (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 169-77.
58 Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 158, 201.
59 Ebrey, The Inner Quarters, pp. 5-6, 85-86.
60 Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in 17th Century China
Personal letters were praised for attributes such as spontaneity and sincerity, and since women were thought to have a special affinity with both qualities, their education having been spared the distortions of the examination system, they were regarded as naturally skilled in letter- writing. 61
Amid this enthusiasm for circulating authentic personal letters in the public realm, the absence of love-letters is notable: whether one- sided or as an exchange, written by men or by women, and circulated posthumously or during their lifetimes, the collection and publication of love-letters was a marginal activity in premodern China. 62 Yet love- letters undoubtedly played an important role in people’s lives, as shown in two exchanges which although of dubious authenticity nevertheless have an ancient lineage as literary texts. 63 Another example, appar- ently fictional but possibly taken from life, is from the famous Tang romance, Yuan Zhen’s 元慎 “Yingying zhuan 鶯鶯傳 ” [The story of Yingying]. In this story, which is thought to be autobiographical, the lovers start their affair by exchanging letters in the form of poems, car- ried by her maid; later, when they are separated, he writes to her in prose and she responds with a long letter also in prose; he shows the
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 52. Susan Mann and Yu-Yin Cheng also note that prose writing by women in Ming and Qing China that survives “generally takes the form of short prefaces, letters, and diaries,” and that “Women are far more visible in personal, intimate, homely, or local texts than they are in texts produced by the imperial scholarly apparatus, or in formal ‘official’ prose”; see “Introduction,” in Under Confucian Eyes, p. 4. Cf. Saintsbury, A Letter Book, p. 29.
61 Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, pp. 72-112.
62 See Kathryn Lowry, trans. and preface, “Personal Letters in Seventeenth-Century Epis- tolary Guides,” in Under Confucian Eyes, pp. 156-67.
63 The first set of love-letters, attributed to the Han poet Sima Xiangru 司馬相如 and his wife Zhuo Wenjun 卓文君, is famous; the second, between an official, Qin Jia 秦嘉, and his wife Xu Shu徐淑, is less well-known; both are fully discussed in Chung, “A Study of the ‘Shu,” pp. 131-35, 643-73.
letter to his friends, concluding that her beauty and therefore her unstable temperament makes her unsuitable to be his wife. 64 The term qingshu 情書[love-letter] in its current sense appears in reported speech in a collection of short fiction by Feng Menglong; in Li Yu’s fiction, un- married as well as married couples exchanged letters, not necessarily by post but without difficulty. 65 Inserted love-letters was common both as a plot device to bring together or to separate lovers, and also as a means whereby the lovers’ thoughts and emotions are revealed.
Manuals, collections and anthologies
The appearance of letter manuals are an obvious reminder that not all letters are spontaneous, or indeed are meant to be. Manuals gave guidance not only on the complex conventions observed in traditional letter-writing, both formal and informal, but were also a guide to manners. “Like the epistolary novels which followed them, manuals often presented complex situations and then produced the tonally subtle and morally impeccable responses appropriate to them.” 66
In Europe, manuals for letter-writing have been popular from the 16th century to the present day. 67 Erasmus(e. 1467─1536) compiled De conscribendis epistolis in 1522 to replace outdated advice; Justi Lipsi (1547 ─ 1606) compiled his influential manual, Epistolica Institutio, in
64 Translated in Anthology of Chinese Literature, compiled and edited by Cyril Birch, pp.
302-10, and in An Anthology of Chinese Literature, edited and translated by Stephen Owen, pp. 540-49.
65 See, for instance, “A Tower for the Summer Heat,” in Li Yu’s collection of the same name, translated with a preface by Patrick Hanan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 3-39.
66 Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel, p. 87.
67 See Roger Chartier, Alain Boureau and Cecile Dauphin, Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997).
1591. 68 Alongside these, but more informally, inserted letters in literary works such as plays by Shakespeare (1564 ─ 1616) could also serve as models for letter-writing. 69
From manuals it was only a short step to compilations of genuine or made-up letters. Collections and anthologies of apparently authentic but anonymous love-letters, written in vernacular prose by women but ed- ited and published by men, became fashionable in 17th century France.
Lettres portugaises (1669), believed by readers at the time to be the authentic love-letters of a despairing Portuguese nun to her mostly in- different lover, was the most widely read and imitated. 70 The existence of manuals, collections and anthologies opened discourse on distinctions between fictional and authentic letters, encouraging but simultaneously subverting the notion that love-letters (or letters in general) were in- variably (or ideally) a spontaneous outflow of emotion and a vehicle for one’s most private thoughts and feelings.
The belief that women were by nature suited to be letter-writers was in common currency in 17th century Europe, but it was not entirely clear what this “women’s nature” consisted of ; some male readers cast doubt on the authenticity of Lettres portugaises on the grounds that no woman could express herself so powerfully. They were right but not nec- essarily for the right reasons. A counter-example is furnished by a
68 Justi Lipsi, Principles of Letter-writing: A Bilingual Text of Justi Lipsi, Epistolica Institutio, edited and translated by R. V. Young and M. Thomas Hester (Carboudale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1996).
69 Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabe- than Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
70 Authorship attributed to Gabriel de Laverge; translated as The Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun by Guido Waldman (London: Harvill, 1996); see also Katherine A. Jensen, “Male Models of Feminine Epistolarity; or, How to Write Like a Woman in Seventeenth-Century France,”
in Goldsmith, Writing the Female Voice, pp. 25-45, and Goldsmith, “Authority, Authenticity, and the Publication of Letters by Women,” in Goldsmith, pp. 46-59.
reference in Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley (1849) to “the equally mad letters of Mrs Elizabeth Rowe from the Dead to the Living.” Elizabeth Rowe (1674 ─ 1737) was a non-conformist religious poet and author, widely admired in her time and translated into French and German. In 1728 she published Friendship in Death, in Twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living, which was reprinted throughout the 18th century, on the immortality of the soul.
The association between women and letters was partly due to the restrictions on women’s movements outside their homes. “Letters were an important line of communication with the outside world at this time when women led rather cloistered lives... So women generally stayed at home writing letters which were at once a way of being involved with the world while keeping it at a respectable arm’s length... Letters were the perfect vehicle for women’s highly developed art of pleasing, for in writing letters it is possible to tailor a self on paper to suit the expecta- tions and desires of the audience. This is why they were used not only to transmit conventional messages, but also to maintain the proper dis- tance in more ticklish matters... Similarly, letters were the place to have skirmishes with lovers and suitors, for they drew the battle lines at a safe remove from the actual person of the modest woman.” 71
Another reason was thought to lie in the nature of letter-writing:
“The unornamented prose style thought appropriate to letters was simul- taneously marked as the mode suitable for writing or speaking the truth... Furthermore, it was claimed that women had a particular pro- pensity for such unpretentious prose.” 72 The supposed natural profi- ciency of women in informal writing was in turn given support by the appearance of such works by women in the 18th century. 73
71 Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel, pp. 69-70.
72 Ibid., pp. 75-76.
73 Jagodzinski, Privacy and Print, pp. 77; George Saintsbury, A Letter Book, pp. 12, 28-29;
In China, letter manuals have an even more ancient history, dating back to the 3rd century. 74 The first comprehensive work of literary criticism, Wen xin diao long 文心雕龍, includes examples of epistolary prose, 75 and the earliest anthology of literature, Wen xuan, also includes a section on letters. 76 The standing of letters as a literary genre was enhanced by the publication of anthologies towards the end of the 16th century. 77 Li Yu’s first effort as a literary compiler was Chidu chuzheng 尺牘初徵[A first compilation of letters], which has a preface dated 1660;
it concentrates on letters from the early Qing and includes letters writ- ten to Li Yu in praise of his early fiction and drama. 78 Guides for per- sonal and intimate letters also appeared in the 17th century, providing models for exchanges of letters by husbands and wives and between lovers. 79
The earliest surviving collection of letters by women is in the last volume in the anthology series Chidu xin yu chu bian 尺牘新語初編[New examples of epistolary writing, first collection] (1663), Chidu xin yu er
George Steiner, “The Distribution of Discourse,” in George Steiner: A Reader (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 345-68, esp. pp. 353-55.
74 Zhou Yiliang周一良 and Zhao Heping趙和平, Tang Wudai shuyi yanjiu 唐五代書儀研究 (Beijing: Chungguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1995), p. 1; see also Patricia Ebrey, “T’ang Guides to Verbal Etiquette,” in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, vol. 45 no. 2 (1985), pp. 581-613.
75 Liu Hsieh, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, translated and annotated by Vincent Yu-chung Shih (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1987), p. 279.
76 For a useful annotated selection of the letters in Wen xuan, see Huang Baozhen黃保真, comp., Gudai wenren shuxin jinghua 古代文人書信精華(Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1992).
77 David Pattinson, “Zhou Lianggong and chidu xinchao: Genre and Political Marginalisation in the Ming-Qing Transition,” in East Asian History, no. 20 (December 2000), pp. 61-82, see p. 62; Widmer, “The Epistolary World of Female Talent,” p. 4. See also Patrick Hanan, The Invention of Li Yu, pp. 185-86 and Andrew H. Plaks, The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 34-35.
78 Patrick Hanan, The Invention of Li Yu, pp. 24-25.
79 Lowry, “Personal Letters in Seventeenth-Century Epistolary Guides,”.
bian 尺牘新語二編[New examples of epistolary writing, second collection]
(1667) and Chidu xin yu guang bian 尺牘新語廣編[New examples of epistolary writing, expanded collection] (1668), which between them contain over a thousand letters. 80 The letters in the first and second volumes are almost all by male writers, either about or to women; the third volume is largely by women to other women or to men; the editors and publishers of all three volumes were male. 81 Most of the letters in the first volume had already been published, but the second and third were largely comprised of letters collected by the editors or submitted by the writers. There is no evidence for the authenticity of the letters (i.
e. who submitted them and under what circumstances), but there is no reason to believe that the letters by women were originally intended for publication. The women letter-writers are mostly from the gentry class, but courtesans and courtesans-turned-concubines are also represented.
Many of the letters by women to women are to carry out the business of poetry clubs and publication. 82 These networking exchanges sometimes took place in the form of poems rather than letters, 83 possibly because letters in prose were not perceived as a major literary form even for women. Of twelve major anthologies of women’s writings from the 17th and 18th century, only one includes letters: Güjin nushi 古今女史[Lady scholars past and present], compiled by the commercial publisher Zhao Shijie 趙世杰 in 1628.84
The association of letters with privacy in premodern China was recognised without necessarily being articulated or invariably observed.
In exile in Huizhou, Su Shi asked his friends not to show his letters to
80 Widmer, “The Epistolary World of Female Talent in Seventeenth Century China”, p. 3.
81 Ibid., p. 5.
82 Ibid., pp. 17-18.
83 Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, p. 15.
84 Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, p. 60.
anyone else (the implication being that letters are for private expression but some circulation might be expected unless otherwise requested), al- though his motive was not to preserve his personal privacy but to avoid political trouble.85 The stronger evidence is negative: the absence of personal letters, especially love-letters, from the collected works of lit- erary and other public figures. In a recent anthology of premodern letters, Huang Baozhen pays attention to their “gexing 個性” [personal or indi- vidual nature] and describes them writings which “tanji renmen xinling de shen du 探及人們心靈的深度” [reach to deep places of people’s hearts and souls]. 86 Overall the selection is based on the letters’ literary and historical significance, but Li Shangyin’s 李商隱 letters are praised for their gexing, and some of the family letters show strong personal emotion.
87 The nearest to what could be called a love-letter in this anthology is the last item, a letter from Liang Qichao to his wife Li Huixian 李惠仙. Writ- ten from Hawai’i in 1900 on a voyage to the U. S., Liang talks frankly to her about falling in love with his young female interpreter, Huizhen蕙珍.
Personal letters of all kinds from earlier times catch the public interest, including letters unearthed from family archives by people whose lives are otherwise obscure, and letters that are clearly spontane- ous as well as those that read as if copied from a draft. 88 Their appeal is explained by Goethe: “What is general takes no finding, thrusts itself upon us, maintains and propagates itself. We make use of it, but we do not
85 Ronald C. Egan, Words, Image, and Deed in the Life of Su Shi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p. 216.
86 Preface to Huang Baozhen, comp., Gudai wenren shuxin jinghua. The preface is dated 1988, and the delay before publication might be related to the political repression which followed the protest movements of 1989.
87 Huang, Gudai wenren shuxin jinghua, pp. 67, 117-19, 158.
88 For examples of love-letters by obscure or anonymous writers, see Fraser, Love Letters, and Hamilton and Soames, Intimate Letters.
love it. We love only the individual; hence our great joy in addresses, confessions, memoirs, letters and anecdotes of the departed, even if they were people of no importance.”89 Other writers who took pleasure in reading old letters and dairies include Virginia Woolf, Zhou Zuoren周作 人 and Yu Dafu 郁達夫. 90
Most commentators see this as a harmless form of gratification: “In reading other people’s published letters, we seek reassurance not only about the stability of a continuous self but about the possibility of intimacy, of fruitful human exchange between members of the same sex as well as between men and women... Despite the objectification in- volved in reading letters, the text, by offering vicarious participation in a harmless simulacrum of gossip, provides comfort: as gossip does.” 91
Put less kindly, unintended readers are impelled by curiosity, espe- cially when the senders and/or recipients are public figures. Some third- party readers, however, are suspicious of the sincerity of professional writers or celebrities, and prefer the naive charm of love-letters by the humble and obscure. 92 Invited to witness the pretence of transgressed privacy, such readers value more authentic invasions.
89 Cited in the Introduction by W. H. Bruford to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letters from Goethe, translated by M. von Herzfeld and C. Melvil Sym (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957), p. xxiii.
90 Virginia Woolf, A Change of Perspective, p. 69; Zhou Zuoren, “Riji yu chidu日記與尺牘,”
[Diaries and correspondence] in Zhitang shuhua 知堂書話 (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 1986), vol. 1, pp. 76-79; Yu Dafu, “Riji wenxue日記文學” [Diary literature] and “Zai tan riji 再談日記,” [More on diaries] in Yu Dafu wen ji 郁達夫文集 (Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 1982), vol. 5, pp. 261-67 and vol. 7, pp. 263-65.
91 Patricia Mayer Spack, Gossip (New York: Knopf, 1985), pp. 77-78. For the relationship between letters, esp. published letters, and gossip, see pp. 69-91.
92 Aldous Huxley found love-letters “commonplace” except for an anonymous suicide note he read in the newspaper; quoted in Fraser, Love Letters, p. xx.
Imagined letters
From manuals, collections and anthologies it was only another short step to the creation of epistolary literature. Even more than anthologies, such works tease readers with revelations of what appear to be essen- tially private experiences, preferably those of the author or the author’s friends or acquaintances. Epistolary fiction in premodern China was never a major genre, although, as noted above, the inserted love-letter was a common device whose origins can be found at least as early as 2nd-century yuefu 樂府 93 and the 5th-century Shi shuo xin yu 世說新語 [New stories and tales of the times], and some 17th-century letter manu- als also show a close affinity with epistolary fiction.94
The first work of literature composed entirely in letter form was Heroides, a series of fifteen letters in verse by Ovid purporting to be written by women lamenting their seduction, betrayal or abandonment.95 It had no obvious successor,96 however, and the outpouring of epistolary fiction in Europe in the 18th century is an extraordinary event in the history of letters. Novel-writing was considered an unseemly occupation for a woman, but letters were the one kind of writing that women were supposed to do well, and published letters and epistolary fiction by women began to appear in England as early as the 17th century.97 The earliest example in English is Aphra Benn’s Love-Letters Between a Nobleman
93 For an example, see Owen, Anthology of Chinese Literature, p. 258.
94 Lowry, “Personal Letters in Seventeenth-Century Epistolary Manuals,” pp. 158-160.
95 See Ovid in Six Volumes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), translated by Grant Showerman, pp. 1-311. For a general discussion see Howard Jacobson, Ovid’s Heroides (New Jersey: Princeton University Press,1974); for its place in epistolary literature, see Kauffman, Discourses of Desire, pp. 17-18, 30-61. See also the poetical letters, Epistulae, by Horace (65-8BC).
96 Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters (London: Faber and Faber, 1998) is a very remote descendant: truly autobiographical, not letters.
97 Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel, p. 68.
and His Sister, based on a true-life elopement and published anony- mously in 1684. 98 Inspired by Lettres portugaises, Benn’s Love-Letters was erotic, scandalous, and immensely successful, and was followed by two further volumes. 99
Publishers and booksellers were quick to see the possibilities of the new form. “The revelatory possibilities of private letters were certainly promoted by publishers of epistolary fiction, who were at great pains to assure their audience that the letters being printed were from real people undergoing real stresses, and that the evidence had not been prepared for public eyes. Advertisements and Prefaces for letter novels tended to stress the authenticity and morality of the works: they could be valued as true life lessons.”100 “Booksellers often advertised the fact that a set of letters had not been intended for publication because privacy, like virginity, invites violation. They traded on the implication that letters could give a more unguarded, natural picture of a life than memoirs which were written with a public audience in mind.”101 “In fact all these novels which begin with the startled discovery of a heap of papers seem too literary and too obvious for our twentieth-century minds, used to more sophisticated tricks of realism. But according to at least one liter- ary historian, readers in those days did believe that what they read was authentic.”102
Novels such as Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740─41) and Clarissa (1747─48) by Samuel Richardson, 103 Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761)
98 Aphra Behn, Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (London: Virago Press, 1987).
99 Janet Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (London: André Deutsch, 1996), pp. 302-11.
100 Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel, p. 72.
101 Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel, p. 70.
102 Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel, p. 73.
103 See Kauffman, Discourses of Desire, pp. 119-157, and James Carson, “Narrative Cross- Dressing and the Critique of Authorship in the Novels of Richardson,” in Goldsmith,
by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; rev.
ed. 1787) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782) by Choderlos de Laclos 104 crossed national borders, reaching unprecedentedly large audiences. These famous works are by male writers, and book buyers at the time were also mainly men; but women were among the readers, and their lives were often the centre of the story. 105 The novels dwell on the perils of courtship, and the letters are a device to focus the reader’s attention on the emotions and ideas held by the letter-writers. Despite this common ground, the differences between the novels show the flexibility of the format.
Clarissa is an exemplar of a “new, subjective, individual and private orientation” in 18th century life and literature; 106 the letters are the reader’s key to the characters’ private worlds. Richardson, who described himself as merely the Editor of the correspondence, was fully aware of the links between letters and the family, courtship and privacy, as shown in the novel’s long subtitle: Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady:
Comprehending the Most Important Concerns of Private Life, And par- ticularly showing The Distress That May Attend the Misconduct Both of Parents and Children, in Relation to Marriage. The letters present the genuine emotions of the virtuous and the deceit practised by the wicked alike; by implication, readers are warned that epistolary passion no matter how forcefully or piteously expressed is no guarantee of good faith.
Richardson was also the author of a manual for letter-writing with
Writing the Female Voice, pp. 95-113.
104 Susan K. Jackson, “In Search of a Female Voice: Les Liaisons dangereuses, ” in Goldsmith, Writing the Female Voice, pp. 154-71.
105 Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel, pp. ix-xiii & 16-21.
106 Ian Watts, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London:
Pimlico, 2000), p. 176; see also Christina Marsden Gillis, The Paradox of Privacy:
Epistolary Form in Clarissa (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1984).
examples composed by him of letters for all occasions; it offered its readers a good deal more than instructions on style. 107 Its subtitle runs, Letters Written To and For Particular Friends on the Most Important Occasions. Directing not only the Requisite Style and Forms To Be Ob- served in Writing FAMILIAR LETTERS; But How to Think and Act Justly and Prudently in the Common Concerns of Human Life. Epistolary fic- tion could also be seen as an informal education for those (like most women) whose opportunities for formal schooling were limited.
On the continent, Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse was the first major success of the genre, running to 72 editions before 1800. 108 Opinion was nevertheless mixed: “Although reaction from some quar- ters was unfavourable, even bitterly hostile, La nouvelle Héloïse was an immediate, unmatched popular success ... In general, the intellectual élite found the novel offensive to taste and morality... None of these strictures, however merited, affected the vast reading public. They were as touched and enraptured by the long sermons as by the sentimentality.
Both appealed to the aspect of the times that delighted in Richardson’s novel and the comedie larmoyante... For most readers Rousseau touched the heart and preached the morality of the heart. He was deluged with letters. A few were hostile (he was a corrupter of morals), most were favourable, many were worshipping.”109 Full-bodied cynicism is the main characteristic of Les Liaisons dangereuses; like its inspiration, Clarissa, it is multi-voiced, but unlike Clarissa, according to its author in the voice of “Editor,” “almost all of the sentiments here expressed are feigned or dissimulated”. 110
107 Frank Kermode and Anita Kermode, eds., The Oxford Book of Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 103-8; Perry, Women, Letters, and the Novel, pp. 9, 88.
108 Lester G. Crocker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Prophetic Voice (1758-1778) (New York:
Macmillan, 1973), pp. 52-53.
109 Crocker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, pp. 99-101.
110 Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses, translated with an introduction by
A sense of exchange is absent from Die Leiden des jungen Werthers:
the letters are mostly from Werther to his silent friend Wilhelm, there is no villain, and an Editor is obliged to step in to carry the narrative to its tragic end; in this case, the epistolary form brings out the nature of “a one-sided and lonely communication.”111 Rather awkwardly, it is also the vehicle for Werther’s musings on literature, philosophy and life.
The century closed with another scandalous novel by a woman writer, Mary Hays’ Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796); another true-life story, this one was based on the author’s adulterous love-affair and incorpo- rated her own love-letters. 112 The delicate balance between fiction and reality and between feigned and true emotion contributed to its huge popularity. 113
Along with their decline in the rituals of daily life, personal letters have become a topos in contemporary English fiction as well as a compo- sitional device. Possession: A Romance by A. S. Byatt concerns the discovery and publication of love-letters between two Victorian writers by contemporary literary scholars. 114 It has frequent reference to inva- sion of the writers’ privacy, which the writers themselves and their relatives wished to preserve against biographers; but the narrative does not give much weight to the writers’ express wishes, compared with the scholars’ career needs and their curiosity. The scholars, on the other
Richard Aldington (London: Folio Society, 1962), p. 56. As well as providing an “Editor’s Preface,” the author also writes a “Publisher’s Note” reminding readers that the text is
“only a Novel” (p. 53).
111 The Sorrows of Young Werther, translated with an introduction and notes by Michael Hulse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 5.
112 Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, pp. 368-68, 410-11.
113 For a brief survey of the many functions of letters in epistolary fiction, see Spack, Gossip, pp. 163-64.
114 A. S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance (London: Chatto and Windus, 1990).
