YOU are 23, Alfred, and I am 31, with so many sorrows, sobs, and heartbreaks behind me! What do you hope from the solitude and exaltation of a grief which is already so piercing? Alas, I am as limp and feeble as a crushed rope. I am stricken down, hanging over my broken hearted love as over a corpse, suffering too much to revive it or to bury it."
This dramatic outpouring was penned by the writer George Sand to a young lover the poet Alfred de Musset in 1834. De Musset was only a brief affair for Sand (she spent 10 years with Chopin), but she obviously experienced the relationship on every level of her being. Distracted with heartbreak, her brain was still clear enough to realise that her lover had treated her selfishly: "In Venice, the very first day I fell ill, you flew into a bad temper and said that there was nothing so depressing as an ailing woman! And was not that the first day of our rupture? My dear boy! I do not wish to indulge in recriminations but I really want to jog your memory, it is so very bad with regard to facts."
In her introduction to this varied, intimate and interesting selection of women's letters, the editor, Olga Kenyon, notes that "letters tell us more about other people's feelings and activities than all but the best biographies and social histories. Of all historical documents, they speak most directly to us. As readers, we are like voyeurs, looking directly into other peoples' lives."
Thus we are offered snapshots and titbits from the lives of women from the second century BC to the present day. Many contain evidence that certain issues of importance to women have not changed. In one of the very first letters written in the world from a woman in Hellenistic Egypt, we find a disgruntled wife complaining to a state official that her husband has tried to "exclude me from my rights": "I beg and beseech you; do not allow me, a defenceless woman, to be deprived of the property pledged for my dowry because of the irresponsibility of the accused."
The letters offer ample evidence of "the ability of women to use a far greater range of discourse, or types of language, than generally realised." Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th century German mystic, preacher, composer and herbalist, writes a letter of spiritual advice to the bishop of Salzburg; Lady Lisle tells how she negotiated with Cromwell to hang on to her property; Mary Queen of Scots tries to organise her return to power; and Mrs Gaskell writes to Dickens about her attempts to rescue a young prostitute from prison.
There is an extended travel section, where we read a letter from the first woman to enter the Forbidden City in Tibet, Alexandra David Neel; and we meet Isabella Bird, who travelled alone across the Rocky Mountains on horseback in 1873. There is also an intriguing letter from Valerie Grosvenor Myer, a friend of Kenyon's, from Sierra Leone, describing ritual cannibalism of pregnant girls and young boys at election time, "to ensure success".
Women write letters to each other as a testament of intimate and supportive friendship, says Kenyon, and to prove her point she not only includes some letters from her own friends, but also writes an autobiographical letter of advice directly to the reader, about "the post menopausal Fifties".
She makes several references to the blurred boundary between letter writing and fiction writing:
"The epistolary novel grew out of women's letter writing". Aphra Behn and the Duchess of Newcastle were creating fictional narratives from letters nearly a century before Defoe and Richardson. Highlighting the crossover, she includes an atmospheric letter from Katharine Mansfield about a lesbian encounter. Kenyon is unsure as to whether this fragment was really intended as a letter; it reads equally convincingly as part of a short story.
Some of the letters, placed side by side, throw each other into vivid relief, as in Queen Victoria's memories of childhood in 1872 ("I was brought up very simply - never had a room to myself until I was nearly grown up - always slept in Mother's room till I came to the Throne"); followed by a first hand account of her working day from an 11 year old girl miner in 1842: "I hurry with my brother. It tires me a great deal, and tires my back and arms. I go sometimes at half past four and sometimes five; it's dark when I go; it often rains and we get wet, but we take off our top clothes when we get in the pit."
Of Irish interest are the love letters written by Shaw and the actress, Mrs Patrick Campbell, to each other, in which she reveals a charming irreverence: "I who have nothing but my little lamp and flame you would blow it out with your bellows of self. You would snuff it with your egotistical snortings ... There is a grumpy letter from Kate O'Brien complaining about changes in her beloved Basque country, while on a more contemporary note we read two letters from an Irish woman written in 1978, where she tries to come to terms with her marriage to a drunkard and the suffering she endured.
Sadly there is none of Somerville and Ross's voluminous, affectionate and hilarious correspondence, which was an essential part of their fiction writing process; none of Maud Gonne's revealing "astral union" letters to Yeats; none of Constance Markievicz's brave letters from prison.
But, irresistibly, we are given Virginia Woolf on the merits of an ugly hat: "I had no hat. Bought one for 7/11 at a shop in Oxford Street: green felt: the wrong coloured ribbon: all a flop like a pancake in mid air. In came the dashing vermeil tinctured red stopper bottle looking Mrs Edwin Montagu. She started. She positively deplored me. Then hid a smile. Looked again. Thought Ah what a tragedy! ... women can't hold out against this kind of flagrant disavowal of all womanliness. They open their arms as to a flayed bird in a blast."
WOMEN's bravery is emphasised. We meet Marion Merriman, an American, the only woman working full time in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. She was raped brutally by a Slav officer who had been working as her assistant, but she decided not to tell her husband: "I concluded I must not hurt Bob with this". Emily Bronte faced premature death from TB with a bravery that is movingly described by Charlotte: "I looked on her with a mixture of anguish and love. I have never seen anything like it; but indeed, I have never seen her parallel in anything while full of truth for others, on herself she had no pity."
Although some of the letters are rather bland in comparison with others, Olga Kenyon manages to illustrate her point: "These letters demonstrate women's capacity to make a great deal out of the little space which society allotted, and to create a remarkable chronicle out of their lives."