The letters in this collection were written during centuries when ‘the bar to success for women was set almost impossibly high’, and the greatness of these letter-writers resides in their resilience in the face of seemingly insuperable odds. Ranging chronologically from Lady Joan Pelham writing to her husband in 1399 to Katherine Mansfield’s letters to John Middleton Murray between 1915 and 1918, the 27 women featured include Nell Gwyn, Mary Wollstonecraft, George Sand and Rosa Luxemburg.

Of all the Mitford sisters, Jessica – known to her friends as Decca – was the most radical, a Communist Party member and passionate supporter of civil rights. She was also, as this volume demonstrates, a prolific, witty and entertaining letter writer, whose address book read like an international Who’s Who, from Guy Burgess and Martin Luther King to Hillary Clinton and Liberace. Peter Y Sussman’s introduction, essays and notes provide fascinating biographical and historical context.

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.

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. This first volume of the Letters originally appeared in 1988 and is republished in this revised edition with approximately 200 new items. It covers the years from the poet's childhood in St Louis, Missouri to 1922, by which time he had settled in England and published The Waste Land.

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.

Donal MacCarron tells the story of an early pioneer aviator who took to the air soon after the Wright brothers proved that man was capable of controlled powered flight. A record-breaking amateur before 1914, Corbett Wilson signed up with the Royal Flying Corps at the outbreak of war. His letters from France to his mother vividly describe the life of a RFC airman in the First World War. He was shot down and killed in 1915.

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.

This selection of 100 letters by Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914-2003) shows him to be a letter-writer of rare accomplishment in the tradition of Madame de Sevigne or Horace Walpole. The book contains only private correspondence, setting the great historian and controversialist in a more intimate light, but also discussing informally topics such as his abhorrence of Communism and the infamous Hitler diaries affair.

A niece of Jane Austen and a novelist herself, Catherine Hubback was 52 when she left England to settle in Oakland, California, where her son worked as a grain merchant. Her letters to family back home - published here for the first time - convey her delight and exasperation at her new environment, and bring a novelist's eye to bear on the people of the rapidly expanding San Francisco Bay area. An introduction charts the life of this adventurous and resourceful woman.

'Novelist, biographer and chronicler of American life', Norman Mailer (1923-2007) was also a prolific letter-writer. Selected from some 45,000 pieces of correspondence, and edited with introductions to each decade by J Michael Lennon, this volume includes letters to family, friends, fellow writers, political figures and cultural icons such as John Lennon and Marlon Brando. It is, in effect, an autobiographical portrait of one of America's greatest writers and one of the 20th century's most provocative intellectuals. American-cut pages.

Ted Hughes described letter writing as 'excellent training for conversation with the world'. Christopher Reid has selected nearly 300 letters which show the many facets of Hughes: poet, husband and father, lover of the natural world, and a man for whom literature was a way of being fully alive to experience. Spanning the poet's life, from age 17 to a few days before his death in 1998, the letters are accompanied by Reid's notes on their biographical and literary context.

Captured after the fall of Singapore in 1942, Charles Steel experienced the horrors of Changi Prison and forced labour on the Burma Railway. This book is an edited collection of the 183 letters he wrote to his wife during the period, which were hidden until liberation. Remaining remarkably upbeat in the face of adversity, the letters report on conditions, his fellow POWs, the Japanese guards and work on the railway.

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.

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.

Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn began their correspondence during the Second Dutch War of 1664-7 when both men were involved with war casualties, Pepys as Clerk of the Acts and Evelyn as a Commissioner for Sick and Wounded Seamen and Prisoners of War. Evelyn's final letter, some 40 years later, is dated a few months before Pepys's death in 1703. Illuminating their friendship and Restoration society generally, this is a complete and fully annotated edition of all the letters that passed between the two great diarists.

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.

Monica Jones was Philip Larkin's lover and confidant for 40 years until his death in 1985. On her death in 2001, almost 2000 letters, postcards and telegrams came to light. Relaxed, intimate, affectionate and often very funny, they chronicle, day by day, almost every aspect of Larkin's life: his poetry and the events that shaped it, his work as a librarian, his friendships, and his insights on literature, from Hardy and DH Lawrence to WH Auden and Kingsley Amis.

Alfred Wainwright (1907-1991) will always be known for his handwritten, hand-drawn Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells. Throughout his life, he was an eloquent and witty correspondent, as this selection of letters, compiled by his biographer and fellow Lakeland resident Hunter Davies testifies. Written to friends, publishers, fans of his guidebooks, and to Betty, his great love and second wife, they reveal a more sensitive character, eccentric, tough-minded yet innocent, than his bluff public persona would suggest.

In the late 1720's, Edmund Burt went to Scotland to work as an engineer on Highland roads and bridges. From his base in Inverness he wrote regularly to a friend in London, describing his experiences and relaying information on everything from the clan system to the scourge of malhoulakins (midges). Written 20 years before Culloden, long before the Highland clearances and first published in 1754, the letters offer a rare picture of contemporary Highland life. The present single-volume edition is introduced by Charles Withers.

Christopher Isherwood was a world-famous novelist when he met Don Bachardy on a Santa Monica beach in 1952. Despite a 30-year age gap, they lived as an openly gay couple in closeted Hollywood. In these charming letters, Isherwood is the stubborn old workhorse Dobbin, Bachardy the playful young Kitty. Candid and affectionate, they draw the reader into the private world of the Animals, offer gossipy sketches of Isherwood's writer and actor friends, and chart Bachardy's burgeoning career as a painter.

Once regarded primarily as a member of the Auden-Isherwood set, Louis MacNeice is now considered one of the greatest Irish poets of the 20th century. This magisterial collection of his letters - to recipients including his family and fellow poets Auden, Eliot and Larkin - offers a humane, witty reflection on his Irish Protestant heritage, his turbulent love life, his work at the BBC - and an enthusiastic celebration of what he described in his poem 'Snow' as 'the drunkenness of things being various'.

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.

This biography is based on the letters and diaries of Grenadier Guardsman General Sir Francis Lloyd (1853-1926) who became GOC London District in 1913 and, throughout the war, had sweeping powers, including running hospitals, railway termini and the capital's defences.

Revered as an artist, Vincent van Gogh was also an impassioned and eloquent letter writer whose correspondence displays a remarkable literary gift and the ability to communicate his ideas about nature, art and life in direct, emotive language. Illustrated with works of art and letters that demonstrate van Gogh's abiding preoccupations - such as the role of colour in painting and the cycles of nature - this magnificent volume explores the letters as a self-portrait of the artist.

From his schooldays to his early death, George Orwell chronicled the dramatic events of his turbulent life in a profusion of powerful letters. This chronological selection, featuring many previously unpublished letters, forms the autobiography he never wrote. In missives to family, friends and fellow writers such as TS Eliot, Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender and Cyril Connolly, he reports from war-ravaged Barcelona, Morocco, and the Isle of Jura, where he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, with characteristic insight, precision and dry humour.

A prominent cleric during the late 18th century, Richard Hurd (1720–1808) was also a significant figure among the literary ‘pre-Romantics’; and his letters, beginning during his fellowship at Emmanuel, Cambridge, address a wide circle of correspondents. Church of England Record Society 3.

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.

Spanning six decades in the life of composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein (1918–90), this selection comprises 650 letters, in which he corresponds with members of his family, fellow musicians such as Aaron Copland, John Cage, Serge Koussevitzky and Stephen Sondheim, and admirers including Jacqueline Kennedy and Bette Davis. The volume also features Bernstein’s lengthy exchange with Walter Hussey, Dean of Chichester, which documents the process of commissioning, composing and performing the Chichester Psalms.

Although Paul Auster and JM Coetzee had been reading each other’s books for years, they did not meet until 2008. Their encounter sparked the correspondence that is presented in this book. Over three years, their letters touch on almost every subject: sport, fatherhood, literature, film, art, politics, philosophy, the financial crisis, eroticism, love and marriage. The result is an intimate and often amusing portrait of the growing friendship between two brilliant minds as they explore the complexities of life.

Hester Piozzi is better known by her first husband’s name, as Samuel Johnson’s correspondent, Mrs Thrale. The letters to her friend Penelope Pennington offer a more intimate and informal account of the lives of wealthy Georgian ladies.

In 1925, Kenneth Clark, then 22, met the legendary art critic Bernard Berenson in Italy. Both were talented letter writers – informative, spontaneous and gossipy – and their correspondence continued until Berenson’s death, aged 94, in 1959. Published in full for the first time, the letters chart Berenson’s role as mentor to Clark’s burgeoning career, and are packed with fascinating reflections on friends and family, travel, politics, books read and written, art and life.

Handsome, spirited and erudite, Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011)was a war hero and one of the greatest travel writers of his generation. He was also a spectacularly entertaining letter writer. This judiciously edited selection of his correspondence spans almost 70 years, and includes letters to Nancy Mitford, Diana Cooper, Lawrence Durrell and his lifelong companion Joan Rayner. They sparkle with his humour, zest for life, unending curiosity, lyrical descriptive powers – and his tendency to get into scrapes.

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.