Yours Always: Letters of Longing

by Eleanor Bass (Editor)

Overview

Love letters are potent. They breathe. They speak. They can arouse, comfort, captivate. They can also cut deep. 
The powerful, deeply personal letters collected here reveal the painful underside of love. Witness Winston Churchill 'growl with anger to be treated with benevolent indifference' and Edith Piaf reel in the throes of a 'terrible' passion. 
Through the letters of literary icons Charlotte Brontë, Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf, Hollywood stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and statesmen Henry VIII and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Yours Always offers an unusually intimate insight into the lives of such illustrious figures. 
Love is revealed here in its many shades of disharmony and confusion: unrequited, uncertain, imbalanced, unconventional, thwarted, failed and forbidden. Love is not always rose-tinted, and Yours Always illuminates the sorrows that can accompany falling in, falling out, and staying in love. 
Includes letter to and from: Charlotte Brontë, Richard Burton, Lord Byron, Winston Churchill, Marie Curie, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Henry VIII, Ted Hughes, Graham Greene, Franz Kafka, Marilyn Monroe, Iris Murdoch, Edith Piaf, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Elizabeth Taylor, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781785781698
Publisher:	Icon Books, Ltd. UK
Publication date:	01/05/2017
Sold by:	Bookwire
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	362 KB

About the Author

Eleanor Bass is a freelance researcher and writer. Having previously read Theology at the University of Cambridge, she obtained her doctorate in English Literature from King's College London in 2015. Her academic interests include life writing, letter writing, and the writing of wartime. Eleanor lives in South-East London with her husband and daughter.

Table of Contents

Editorial Note

Introduction

Unrequited and Unequal Love

Charlotte Brontë to Professor Constantin Héger

Winston Churchill to Muriel Wilson

Iris Murdoch to David Hicks and Raymond Queneau

W.B. Yeats and Maud Gonne

Andre de Dienes to Marilyn Monroe

Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn

Virginia Stephen and Leonard Woolf

David Hume to La Comtesse de Boufflers

Charles Dickens to Maria Beadnell

Claire Clairmont to Lord Byron

Edith Wharton to Morton Fullerton

Rebecca West to H.G. Wells

Conflicted and Condemned Love

Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer

Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland

Ernest Hemingway and Agnes von Kurowsky

Edith Piaf to Dmitris Horn and Louis Gérardin

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

Loretta Young to Spencer Tracy

Graham Greene to Catherine Walston

Abelard and Héloïse

Marie Curie to Paul Langevin

Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas

Katherine Parr and Thomas Seymour

Franklin D. Roosevelt to Lucy Rutherfurd

A Final Word

Vera Brittain and Roland Leighton

Ted Hughes to Sylvia Plath

Sources, Copyright and Thanks

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Editorial Reviews

05/01/2017
Reading love letters can offer a window into the minds of some of history's most well-known people, and it's the immediacy of these letters, argues freelance writer Bass, that serves as one of their main draws. Another huge draw? Angst. Using 26 different sets of brief selected correspondence, Bass compiles a collection that contextualizes the essence of longing. (Poet W.B. Yeats, physicist Marie Curie, and novelist Franz Kafka are all here, among many others.) The editorial notes at the start of each section are often longer than the letters themselves, as Bass's bibliography is meticulous. Yet readers may wish that she'd delved more deeply into fewer couples. The pairings are organized by their "resonances," so "Andre de Dienes to Marilyn Monroe" directly precedes "Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn," and it works. Notably affecting exchanges include "Rebecca West to H.G. Wells" and "Loretta Young to Spencer Tracy." Readers exploring the painful side of love will find much to appreciate. VERDICT The letters themselves tell part of each pairing's tale, but Bass makes sure the emotional punch hits home.—Audrey Snowden, Orrington P.L., ME

Library Journal