Letters

The Devonshire family stood at the pinnacle of Georgian society, and the two duchesses who bore that title were prolific correspondents. Drawing on unique access to family papers, Elizabeth’s grandson Vere Foster published these transcriptions of their letters in 1896. With correspondents including the Prince Regent, Charles James Fox, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and the Emperor of Russia, they provide a rare insight into the political and cultural life of the Napoleonic era.

Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry met in 1912 and married in 1918. Affectionate, informal and gossipy, their letters chart their stormy partnership, her writing, relations with the Bloomsbury Group, and the illness that would claim her at just 34. First published in 1988.

Aristocrat, socialite, actress and wife of Duff Cooper, Churchill's wartime Minister for Information, later Ambassador to France and Viscount Norwich, Diana Cooper was also an inveterate letter-writer. Gathered here, her missives to her only son John Julius Norwich during the Second World War and its aftermath provide a vivid picture of the age and its personalities, and a woman of great intelligence, happiest on her country smallholding but able to cope with the demands on a politician's wife.

TS Eliot entrusted the selection and editing of his letters to his wife Valerie, and in these volumes she presents the correspondence in chronological order, with detailed notes and, at the end of each volume, biographical notes on the correspondents, an index of correspondents and a general index. The prolific and varied correspondence in this second volume reflects Eliot's profoundly influential work as editor of the Criterion and cultural commentator. It demonstrates not only the emerging continuities between his thinking as poet and essayist, but also their relation to his friendships and personal circumstances.

TS Eliot entrusted the selection and editing of his letters to his wife Valerie, and in these volumes she presents the correspondence in chronological order, with detailed notes and, at the end of each volume, biographical notes on the correspondents, an index of correspondents and a general index. During the crucial years covered by Volume III, Eliot set a new course for his life and work: he was received into the Church of England and naturalized as a British citizen; and there was a new manner and vision in his poetry, with the first of the Ariel poems, 'Journey of the Magi' in 1927.

While serving as an orderly at a military hospital during the First World War, the artist Stanley Spencer met Desmond Chute, the aesthetic son of a Bristol theatre family, who introduced him to classical literature and the Confessions of St Augustine. These 31 letters document their friendship, Spencer’s combat in Macedonia and his evocative memories of the village of Cookham. Illustrated with facsimiles and Spencer’s own drawings, they shed light on his artistic development.

This first volume of the authoritative edition of Hemingway's letters covers his experiences in the First World War and his arrival in Paris, and offers, at first-hand, insights into his inspirations and creative process.

Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989) was one of the most influential English composers of the 20th century. This biography charts his life and career in his own words. After an introduction by Dickinson, who first met Berkeley in 1956, it presents its subject's account of the musical life of Paris between the wars, his letters to his teacher Nadia Boulanger, and his first-hand memories of fellow composers Ravel, Poulenc, Stravinsky and Britten, as well as Dickinson's interviews with Berkeley's colleagues and friends.

During the Napoleonic Wars, Sir William Hamilton was George III's ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples and his letters to the English court, 1798 to 1799, provide a vivid, day-by-day account of European events.

The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) would spend up to four hours a day on her correspondence, writing to friends, lovers, students, fans and even casual acquaintances. This selection of her letters, edited and introduced by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe, gives a kaleidoscopic portrait of a life lived to capacity and marked by numerous emotional imbroglios and intense friendships with fellow philosopher Philippa Foot and novelist Brigid Brophy, alongside a long and stable marriage to John Bayley.

After a disastrous marriage, Rosina Bulwer-Lytton (1802-1882) earned her living writing novels. In books such as Cheveley, or The Man of Honour (1839) she vilified her ex-husband, but also successfully drew attention to the plight of abused and separated women generally. Her letters, spanning 1825 to 1881, reveal the intensity of her efforts to expose Bulwer-Lytton's wrong-doings and the difficulty of her life as a single woman separated from her children, and as a writer. No jackets.

For more than 30 years, Finnish composer Jean Sibelius corresponded in a mixture of French and German with Rosa Harriet Newmarch, Britain's leading authority on Russian music. Now published in a complete English translation for the first time, their letters, notes and telegrams reveal the intensity of their friendship, provide some of Sibelius' frankest statements about his own works and illuminate Newmarch's important contribution to British musical life. An appendix reprints her analytical programme note on the 4th Symphony.

Misunderstood by his peers but hailed by later generations as the father of modern art, Cézanne has long fascinated artists and art lovers, writers, poets and philosophers. This new annotated translation of his letters provides fresh insight into his views on art, politics, literature and friendship. Illustrated with more than 70 images, this book enriches our knowledge of the artist and the man, who emerges as wittier, wiser, more irascible, more philosophical, and above all, more fully human.

Covering the period from 1747 to the eve of the French Revolution, the letters in this volume include both religious and political debate, and the emergence of a theologically distinct Unitarian denomination. No jacket.

Volume II covers the period from the French Revolution to Lindsey’s death in 1808, and reveals his central role in the formation of Unitarianism, and his involvement in movements for political and religious reform. No jacket.

This collection of letters to and from the harpsichordist, scholar and early music pioneer Ralph Kirkpatrick spans his career, from Paris in the 1930s to the 1980s, and includes a selection of family letters as well as correspondence with composers and colleagues.

Jennifer Worth (1935–2011) based her hugely successful books, Call the Midwife, Shadows of the Workhouse and Farewell to the East End, on her own experiences in the East End in the 1950s. This book contains letters from all sorts of people – from other midwives to lorry drivers – responding to the books and telling their own stories. There are also writings by Jennifer herself, a biographical introduction by family members and a foreword by Miranda Hart.

After Himmler’s suicide in 1945, his letters were believed lost. Then, in 2014, they were discovered in Tel Aviv and authenticated by historians. Edited by his great-niece, they present a chilling glimpse into the mind of a mass murderer. His correspondence with his family presents a man whose life was governed by logic rather than empathy, and who considered his actions in the war to be a necessary and decent duty befitting the ‘great times’ he lived in.

No. 102 Boulevard Haussmann is an elegant address in the eighth arrondissement of Paris. Upstairs lives Madame Williams, with her second husband and her harp; downstairs, Marcel Proust is trying to write In Search of Lost Time. Between 1909 and 1919, a correspondence that starts with a request for silence develops into a touching friendship, discussing books, music, domestic arrangements, illness, and the sadness of losing friends in the war.

Spanning Thomas’s Welsh childhood, his early career and marriage, this volume charts his growing confidence as a poet as he experiments with ideas, submits work for publication, and corresponds with prominent figures in the literary world, including TS Eliot, Stephen Spender and Edith Sitwell.

The letters in this second volume cover the years of fame, the exhilaration and pain of Thomas’s tempestuous marriage to Caitlin Macnamara, his drinking and his hell-raising. They record the creation of Under Milk Wood, and the slide into alcoholism that claimed his life during a poetry-reading tour in New York.

The artist Stanley Spencer made several attempts to write an autobiography, but completed none of them. His grandson has combined these fragments with his notebooks, diaries and letters to provide a first-hand account of his life. Illustrated with Spencer’s paintings and drawings alongside period photographs, the resulting narrative records the development of his art and personality from his childhood in Cookham through his training at the Slade to his experiences in the First World War.

In chapters devoted to each monarch – Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I – this is a narrative account of the Tudor period, told through 42 letters and documents in the British Library’s collections. From Henry VII and Elizabeth of York’s autograph inscriptions in a prayer book, to a letter from Elizabeth I to James VI of Scotland in 1603, each item is illustrated in colour, fully transcribed and accompanied by a commentary setting it in historical context.

Letters written as editor of the school magazine, love letters, begging letters, letters to literary editors, fellow poets and friends: the collected letters of Dylan Thomas trace his life from the age of 16 to shortly before his death in New York in 1953, at the age of 39. Outspoken, and often indiscreet, they form the poet’s own narrative, telling of his love of Caitlin, his opinions on poets and poetry, and a life famously marred by drink and debt. Second edition. The two titles included in this set are: Dylan Thomas The Collected Letters Volume I: 1931–1939 (Read more...)Dylan Thomas The Collected Letters Volumes II: 1939–1953 (Read more...)

During the last decade of his life Leoš Janácek sent hundreds of passionate letters to Kamila Stösslová, a married woman half his age. Selections from their correspondence are translated in this volume, with linking commentary, photographs and a decoding of the lovers’ erotic references. Their words reveal how much this relationship inspired the composer’s final, greatest works – including the String Quartet ‘Intimate Letters’ – and shed valuable light on his personality.

Celebrated for his travelogues, Patrick Leigh Fermor was also a prolific letter writer to friends including Nancy Mitford, Lawrence Durrell and his lifelong companion Joan Rayner. Spanning 70 years, this collection exhibits his characteristic humour, learning, lust for life and love of language, and recounts such extraordinary incidents as his abrupt dismissal from Somerset Maugham’s villa, and the recovery by his Romanian lover of his long-lost travel diary. Off-mint with felt-tip mark on lower trimmed edge.

Mme Marie Williams, the wife of an American dentist, lived in the apartment directly above Marcel Proust’s in 102 Boulevard Haussmann and, despite their proximity, Proust and Mme Williams wrote to one another. Proust’s were often about the noise, yet always exquisitely expressed and often accompanied by flowers; the 23 letters are presented here with a foreword by Jean-Yves Tadié. Translated, with an afterword, by Lydia Davis.

Off-mint.

Wry, witty and highly observant, this collection of 50 of Frida Kahlo's letters to her beloved mother, illustrated with her art and family photographs and published here for the first time in English, reveals the close nature of their relationship between 1923 and 1932.

Letters of Note was an unexpected publishing sensation - a crowd-funded anthology of letters that became an international bestseller. This follow-up delivers the same mix of the tragic, the comic, the heartfelt and the historically significant. Illustrated with colour facsimiles of the original letters, it includes Richard Burton's farewell note to Elizabeth Taylor on their divorce, David Bowie's touching reply to his first American fan letter, and the final missive from a doomed Japan Airlines flight.