Showing results for "The Letters" in Diaries & Journals

After her mother, Brenda, passed away and her father sold the family home, broadcaster and writer Emma Kennedy found herself floundering, unable to make peace with the complex, charismatic woman who had been her mum. And then they found the letters. This heartbreakingly funny book about the impact of discovering lost letters is a celebration of correspondence; those lost acts of penned love, the vivid snapshots in time scattered back through a life.

George Gordon Byron was born in 1788, the son of the profligate 'Mad Jack' Byron, and succeeded to the title in 1798 moving to the family seat of Newstead Abbey. He attended Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he proved to be a poor scholar, preferring boxing, the low life and poetry, publishing his first volume of poems in 1806. In 1809, at 21, he embarked on a grand tour of Europe and on his return to England he married the humourless Annabella Milbanke, who gave birth to his daughter Augusta in 1815.

Born at Steventon in 1775, the daughter of a Hampshire clergyman, Jane Austen was the youngest of seven children. She lived a quiet life, moving to Bath, Southampton, Chawton and eventually to Winchester where she died unmarried in 1817 at the age of 42. It is to her elder sister Cassandra that most of her surviving letters are written, and through them, we discover the intimate world of the English gentry.

Viscount Horatio Nelson (1758-1805), known as ‘The Hero’ during his own lifetime was both an inspiring commander and an innovative tactician, becoming a rear admiral after defeating the Spanish fleet at the Battle of Cape St Vincent. He was also responsible for the great victories of the Nile (1798) and Copenhagen (1801). Revered by his officers and men, he was renowned for both his arrogance and his scandalous love affair with the beautiful Emma Hamilton.

The brief and tragic life of Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) is told through the beautiful and passionate letters written by Charlotte to her best friend Ellen Nussey. Born and brought up in the bleak Haworth parsonage with only her sisters and brother for company, she soon obtains employment as a Governess. Having travelled abroad to study languages in Brussels, she returns to the Yorkshire moors to join her family where she writes her most successful novel, Jane Eyre.

A wonderfully written account of a father's relationship with his troubled son, as told through his funny, tender letters. In 2007 Michael Maitland left home for university, and in the years that followed he developed depression, OCD and, almost fatally, anorexia. It was only when Michael was taken to hospital in 2012, his body shutting down and his organs failing, that the family realised exactly what was happening.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Louise Brealey read a love story in letters, played out against the backdrop of the Second World War. 'Can you feel, as you read these words, that I am thinking of you now; aglow, alive, alert at the thought that you are in the same world, and by some strange chance loving me.' A small blue box opened in 2008 revealed a wartime world of love, longing and frustration. Inside were bundles and bundles of letters written neatly on thin blue airmail paper or headed army notepaper.

Gertrude Stein and Laura Riding enjoyed a fascinating if brief three-year friendship via correspondence between 1927 and 1930, and in A Description of Acquaintance, Logan Esdale and Jane Malcolm make the letters available to a larger audience for the first time. Riding and Stein are important figures in twentieth-century poetry and poetics and are considered progenitors of later movements such as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry.

Der Brief an den Vater ist ein 1919 verfasster, niemals abgeschickter Brief Franz Kafkas an seinen Vater. Er wurde postum 1952 in der Neuen Rundschau veröffentlicht und ist ein bevorzugter Text für psychoanalytische und biographische Studien über Kafka.