A love letter from Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

Who better to write the world’s most memorable love letters than the world’s most famous writers? In the case of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the love affair was between two of the most influential poets of the Victorian age… 

January 10th, 1845

I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett, – and this is no off-hand complimentary letter that I shall write,- whatever else, no prompt matter-of-course recognition of your genius and there a graceful and natural end of the thing: since the day last week when I first read your poems, I quite laugh to remember how I have been turning again in my mind what I should be able to tell you of their effect upon me – for in the first flush of delight I thought I would this once get out of my habit of purely passive enjoyment, when I do really enjoy, and thoroughly justify my admiration – perhaps even, as a loyal fellow-craftsman should, try and find fault and do you some little good to be proud of herafter! – but nothing comes of it all – so into me has it gone, and part of me has it become, this great living poetry of yours, not a flower of which but took root and grew… oh, how different that is from lying to be dried and pressed flat and prized highly and put in a book with a proper account at bottom, and shut up and put away… and the book called a ‘Flora’, besides!

Browning first met Barrett in 1845, and their creative admiration for one another would soon turn romantic. They eloped in 1846 to avoid Barrett’s disapproving, tyrannical father, and lived happily in Italy until Barrett’s death in 1861, their fame and their love for one another increasingly assured…

Images: Gaston D. Haese and Wikimedia Commons.

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A love letter from Voltaire to Catherine Olympe Dunoyer.

Who better to write the world’s most memorable love letters than the world’s most famous writers? Picture a teenage François-Marie Arouet, imprisoned (as he would be many times) for his convictions. And the cause this time? His love of French refugee Catherine Olympe Dunoyer: 

The Hague 1713

I am a prisoner here in the name of the King; they can take my life, but not the love that I feel for you.

Yes, my adorable mistress, to-night I shall see you, if I had to put my head on the block to do it.

For heaven’s sake, do not speak to me in such disastrous terms as you write; you must live and be cautious; beware of Madame your mother as of your worst enemy.

What do I say?

Beware of everybody; trust no one; keep yourself in readiness, as soon as the moon is visible; I shall leave the hotel incognito, take a carriage or a chaise, we shall drive like the wind to Sheveningen; I shall take paper and ink with me; we shall write our letters.

If you love me, reassure yourself; and call all your strength and presence of mind to your aid; do not let your mother notice anything, try to have your pictures, and be assured that the menace of the greatest tortures will not prevent me to serve you.

No, nothing has the power to part me from you; our love is based upon virtue, and will last as long as our lives.

Adieu, there is nothing that I will not brave for your sake; you deserve much more than that.

Adieu, my dear heart!

Arout

Shortly after writing this letter, it’s believed that Arout kept his word and made his escape. It would be another 5 years before he would adopt the name history remembers him by – Voltaire (an anagram of his Latinized name AROVET LI). He would go on to become one the greatest writers of the French Enlightenment.

Images: Wikimedia Commons and History And Women.

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The love letters of Franz Kafka and Felice Bauer.

Who better to write the world’s most memorable love letters than the world’s most famous writers? This week we turn to the intense, complicated and ultimately tragic figure of Franz Kafka and his twice-fiancée, Felice Bauer:

Fräulein Felice!

I am now going to ask you a favor which sounds quite crazy, and which I should regard as such, were I the one to receive the letter. It is also the very greatest test that even the kindest person could be put to. Well, this is it:

Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday — for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them. For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life; and that’s why I don’t want to know that you are fond of me. If I did, how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you? Oh, there is a sad, sad reason for not doing so. To make it short: My health is only just good enough for myself alone, not good enough for marriage, let alone fatherhood. Yet when I read your letter, I feel I could overlook even what cannot possibly be overlooked.

If only I had your answer now! And how horribly I torment you, and how I compel you, in the stillness of your room, to read this letter, as nasty a letter as has ever lain on your desk! Honestly, it strikes me sometimes that I prey like a spectre on your felicitous name! If only I had mailed Saturday’s letter, in which I implored you never to write to me again, and in which I gave a similar promise. Oh God, what prevented me from sending that letter? All would be well. But is a peaceful solution possible now? Would it help if we wrote to each other only once a week? No, if my suffering could be cured by such means it would not be serious. And already I foresee that I shan’t be able to endure even the Sunday letters. And so, to compensate for Saturday’s lost opportunity, I ask you with what energy remains to me at the end of this letter: If we value our lives, let us abandon it all.

Kafka and Bauer first met in 1912, and commenced a relationship we only know of from one perspective, Kafka’s. When they broke up in 1917 after 5 years of intense correspondence and two engagements (and the writing of some of Kafka’s most famous works including The Metamorphosis and The Trial), Kafka burned all of Bauer’s letters to him. She kept his, eventually giving them to Schocken Books to publish as Letters To Felice.

Bauer would marry another man in 1919; Kafka would die of tuberculosis in 1924, at age 40.

See Also:

Love Letters #1: Honoré de Balzac

Love Letters #2: John Keats & Fanny Brawne

Love Letters #3: F. Scott Fitzgerald & Zelda Sayre

Images: Los Ultimos de Wonderland and Time’s Flow Stemmed.

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The love letter of Zelda Sayre to her future husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

You’d expect the world’s most memorable love letters to come from its most famous writers – but what about their spouses? This week, we turn the clock back to Spring 1919 with the impassioned words of Zelda, future wife of the great American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald…

Sweetheart,

Please, please don’t be so depressed – We’ll be married soon, and then these lonesome nights will be over forever – and until we are, I am loving, loving every tiny minute of the day and night – Maybe you won’t understand this, but sometimes when I miss you most, it’s hardest to write – and you always know when I make myself – Just the ache of it all – and I can’t tell you. If we were together, you’d feel how strong it is – you’re so sweet when you’re melancholy. I love your sad tenderness – when I’ve hurt you – That’s one of the reasons I could never be sorry for our quarrels – and they bothered you so – Those dear, dear little fusses, when I always tried so hard to make you kiss and forget –

Scott – there’s nothing in all the world I want but you – and your precious love – All the material things are nothing. I’d just hate to live a sordid, colorless existence – because you’d soon love me less – and less – and I’d do anything — anything — to keep your heart for my own – I don’t want to live – I want to love first, and live incidentally – Why don’t you feel that I’m waiting – I’ll come to you, Lover, when you’re ready — Don’t don’t ever think of the things you can’t give me — You’ve trusted me with the dearest heart of all — and it’s so damn much more than anybody else in all the world has ever had —

How can you think deliberately of life without me – If you should die – O Darling – darling Scott – It’d be like going blind. I know I would, too, – I’d have no purpose in life – just a pretty – decoration. Don’t you think I was made for you? I feel like you had me ordered – and I was delivered to you – to be worn – I want you to wear me, like a watch – charm or a button hole boquet – to the world. And then, when we’re alone, I want to help – to know that you can’t do anything without me.

Filled with doubt about Fitzgerald’s plans to make a career as a short story writer, Sayre would break off her engagement – only to resume it in the fall of 1919 when Scribner accepted Fitzgerald’s first novel This Side Of Paradise. They were married in 1920.

Images: Wikimedia Commons / Wikimedia Commons

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Who better to write the world’s most memorable love letters than the world’s most famous writers? This week in history’s most passionately-penned correspondence, we turn to the most tragic of the romantic poets, John Keats (1795-1821), writing to the love of his life, Fanny Brawne:

My Dearest Girl,

I have been a walk this morning with a book in my hand, but as usual I have been occupied with nothing but you: I wish I could say in an agreeable manner. I am tormented day and night. They talk of my going to Italy. ‘Tis certain I shall never recover if I am to be so long separate from you: yet with all this devotion to you I cannot persuade myself into any confidence of you….

You are to me an object intensely desirable — the air I breathe in a room empty of you in unhealthy. I am not the same to you — no — you can wait — you have a thousand activities — you can be happy without me. Any party, anything to fill up the day has been enough.
How have you pass’d this month? Who have you smil’d with? All this may seem savage in me. You do no feel as I do — you do not know what it is to love — one day you may — your time is not come….

I cannot live without you, and not only you but chaste you; virtuous you. The Sun rises and sets, the day passes, and you follow the bent of your inclination to a certain extent — you have no conception of the quantity of miserable feeling that passes through me in a day — Be serious! Love is not a plaything — and again do not write unless you can do it with a crystal conscience. I would sooner die for want of you…

Yours for ever

J. Keats

Keats would never marry his true love – he would be taken by tuberculosis before he could present Brawne with a marriage proposal she could practically accept, and he died in Rome at the terribly young age of 26.

The love affair between Keats & Brawne was fictionalised in 2009 in Jane Campion’s Bright Star.

Images: Wikimedia Commons / Wikimedia Commons

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Who better to write the world’s most memorable love letters than the world’s most famous writers? We take a look at the most passionate snail-mail the world has ever seen, starting with French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850):

My beloved angel,

I am nearly mad about you, as much as one can be mad: I cannot bring together two ideas that you do not interpose yourself between them.

I can no longer think of anything but you. In spite of myself, my imagination carries me to you. I grasp you, I kiss you, I caress you, a thousand of the most amorous caresses take possession of me.

As for my heart, there you will always be – very much so. I have a delicious sense of you there. But my God, what is to become of me, if you have deprived me of my reason? This is a monomania which, this morning, terrifies me.

I rise up every moment saying to myself, “Come, I am going there!” Then I sit down again, moved by the sense of my obligations. There is a frightful conflict. This is not life. I have never before been like that. You have devoured everything.

I feel foolish and happy as soon as I think of you. I whirl round in a delicious dream in which in one instant I live a thousand years. What a horrible situation!

Overcome with love, feeling love in every pore, living only for love, and seeing oneself consumed by griefs, and caught in a thousand spiders’ threads.

O, my darling Eva, you did not know it. I picked up your card. It is there before me, and I talk to you as if you were there. I see you, as I did yesterday, beautiful, astonishingly beautiful.

Yesterday, during the whole evening, I said to myself “she is mine!” Ah! The angels are not as happy in Paradise as I was yesterday!

– Honoré de Balzac to Ewelina Hańska (a Polish countess) in June 1836. Balzac would finally marry Hańska in 1850 – just five months before his death.

Images: Wikimedia Commons / Wikimedia Commons

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